My name is Wendy Wilson and I hail from Parkerford, Pennsylvania.
I am a proud American, farmer’s stock by blood.
My husband was a proud member of the US Army and was sent over to Afghanistan to fight the evil-doers.
When he left, I had two sons and my daughter was lazily growing in my pregnant belly.
My husband, the brave soldier, had perished while fighting to maintain our freedom. A roadside bomb or some nonsense.
I went into early labor when I heard the news.
A death and a birth all at the same time.
The grief and joy drove me crazy and I was institutionalized, which is why I have a full-time nurse and his wife living at my home with me and my three children. They help out with the newly born, premature baby and the twins so that the pressure does not drive me back into the mad house. They do all the errands, drive us anywhere we need to go if we absolutely have to leave the house and they take the kids out to the park once a day. Only one of them goes when they leave the house, so that the other is there to watch over me and make sure I don’t do anything “stupid”.
At least, so I’m told.
I do as I’m told.
I’ve been doing as I’ve been told for more than a year now.
It seems never ending and it’s taking a toll on me, but I think the greatest toll is on the kids. They are so young that they may not know exactly what is going on, but they know their Daddy is not here anymore. They know that they have moved across the country umpteen times in the last year. They know that Henry, my nurse, keeps a gun on him at all times, and so does his wife. They know that only one of them sleeps at a time at night, while the other sits in front of a computer, on their phone or watching their special tv that they set up in the little farmhouse just for them.
The farm house with no farm
The life with no real substance.
I said that my name is Wendy Wilson. My children are James and Jordan Wilson (the twins) and Jaimie Wilson (my daughter). Those are our new names that represent our new personas – again. We have changed a thousand times – or at least it seems as if it were a thousand times. The boys think that this is all a game – and know that they are not allowed to tell anyone about the game. It’s a secret between me and them and Henry and his wife, Olivia.
My husband was so proud that we had sons. He took them everywhere and was a model father and he loved his boys dearly. Maybe too dearly. For two years he was the model father, he even insisted that we started going back to church as an example to his boys. So, every Sunday we would get the boys all dressed up and take the train across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan to attend the 10:15am Choir mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He wanted the boys to become “cultured” – to hear the beautiful music amidst the historical architecture set in the middle of the modern city. He said that he wanted them to LIVE their education, not just read it in some book or hear it from some teacher. He wanted them to absorb all the sights and sounds around them and to question everything.
He was the perfect Dad. Patient, kind and loving.
I became pregnant again two years later, and he was so excited.
That is until we found out the sex of the baby.
He walked out of the room when they told him, with not a single word to myself, the nurse or the doctor. I went outside, but he had taken off and was nowhere to be seen. He was not answering his cellphone. I went to his mother’s place which was a short walk away, to pick up the boys, only to find out that he already had taken them and had told her that they were going for ice cream.
Relieved, I went home and waited for them.
And I kept waiting.
And waiting.
He came home after 11 pm, one sleepy son slung over one shoulder, the other over the next.
He walked past me silently, put the boys in their room and then went into the washroom.
I waited for him to come out and then asked if everything was okay.
He looked at me, still silent, and walked into our bedroom, closing and locking the door behind him.
I knocked for a while, then realized that I may wake up the boys, so I slept on the sofa that night.
The next morning, he left before I woke up. He must have been making an extra effort to be quiet because I usually wake up at every peep.
When he came home that night, he sat at the dinner table and was his normal self again. That is, until the boys went to bed when he just became the silent ghost he was the night before.
At least he let me sleep in the bed next to him.
I kept asking him what was wrong but he would just look at me.
I didn’t want to bring it up in front of the kids, and I tried my best not to show them the tension in the house.
I even hid my crying from them, crying in the shower daily when they were at daycare.
The tension that kept getting worse and that, at the time, I didn’t understand.
This went on for two months or so – without any change. There was no change in behavior – he didn’t get worse, nor did he get better.
I learned to enjoy the time spent together as a family and to try to ignore the silent monster that lurked around my apartment at night.
It was all I could do to stay sane.
Then, out of the blue, my husband came home smiling one Friday. The boys were not with him.
He had left them with their grandmother for the weekend because he was taking me to the cottage to relax.
I took this as a good sign, and hoped that whatever had gone wrong, we could discuss it and defeat it this weekend.
I packed quickly, we jumped in the car and headed out.
I never returned to that apartment.
As I walked into the cottage, I felt something hard hit the back of my head and I fell to the floor, my head pounding as it bled.
Then the kicks started. The first, directly in my face, breaking my nose. The second, to the stomach, right where the baby was.
I tried my best to protect her by curling up and guarding her with my body, but the blows kept coming and soon I blacked out.
I woke up in a hospital room, bandaged and with no baby bump. Screaming as I woke up, a nurse and two policemen came running in.
Some hunters had heard me screaming and had rushed to my aid. They reached late, though and had not found my husband anywhere nearby. Only me, bloody and barely breathing on the floor.
As good hunters do, some of them tracked him while the others stayed with me and called the authorities.
The doctors had to deliver my daughter while I was still blacked out or risk both our lives.
The little girl was a fighter, because, although she was bruised and not quite ready to have been born, she was doing well in the incubators and was the hit of the nursery.
My husband was arrested and was being held.
My sons were in the custody of social services and I would be getting them back as soon as I was ready and able.
I moved to Queen’s where my best friend lived, and brought my children with me. I was unable to go back to the apartment. I shuddered at the very thought.
My friend went and got our things, bit by bit, a little everyday. I am eternally grateful.
Then, his trial came up and he got off based on insubstantial evidence.
Apparently he had been plotting this well all this time – he left no evidence of himself in the cottage, had rented it under my name.
Everything was going well, until that night when he decided that he wanted his boys back.
He showed up drunk in the middle of the night in front of my friend’s apartment, screaming my name and ringing all the buzzers he could manage to find.
He started screaming profanities to me and then started calling my sons by name, telling them to come home.
“Bros before hos” he screamed.
I ran to my children and held all of them, rocking them as he ranted and raved. My friend immediately called the police and they came and convinced him to leave me alone.
The day after, we had another visit from a detective who introduced herself as Detective Smith – I am not even sure it was her real name.
Apparently my husband was wanted in three states. He had done this to two other women, both of who were dead because of it.
He had married both of these women, but when they became pregnant with girls, he had violently slaughtered them.
One was in Florida. He had slit her throat, driven out to the Everglades and dumped her body. He was young then, only twenty years old. The poor girl was seventeen and probably enamoured with him. It was his first time and he had dumped the body near a busy highway. It was found almost immediately, but he had already taken off.
The second was in Chicago. The police had been called when, during an architectural river tour, a tourist had screamed. The body was floating to the side of the boat, face down. She was strangled. Again, he had left town.
I guess I was to be his third, but I got pregnant with boys, and TWIN boys at that!
They were scared for me because no one had told him where I was staying – when he wanted to see the boys, I met him at the church and picked them up at the same place later in the evening. I was very careful to not let him follow me, and I was very careful to warn the children not to tell him where we were. That’s when their “game” had started.
I had to leave. I had to change. I had to take my kids with me and become someone else, somewhere else.
A completely new life so that we could live.
He keeps finding us.
I don’t know how he does it but he does.
He keeps finding us and we keep moving, running.
We just reached here a week ago. A town called Puckett in Mississippi.
I had never heard of it before, nor had I heard of Parkerford where I was supposedly from, nor had I heard of Stapleton, Alabama where we were living previously to this.
This year, they decided that maybe he would not look for us in the most rural of areas. We were city creatures, he would not predict it they said.
Yet he did.
He found us every single time.
So, today, my name is Wendy Wilson from Parkerford, Pennsylvania. I live in Puckett, Mississippi with my two sons and beautiful little baby daughter.
I just moved here to take over this farm.
My husband was a war hero, who has unfortunately passed and left this little family to fend for themselves.
I have two nurses who stay with me and the family. One for the children (specifically my preemie) and one for me to make sure I’m okay with the emotional trauma of having my hero husband pass away.
I don’t work yet because of the grief, but I was trained as a elementary school teacher and am hoping to work within the year.
This is me.
This is my family.
This is my story.
********************************************************************************************************************************************************************
For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Leslie challenged me with “We have changed a thousand times” and I challenged Aimee with “What is beautiful is not necessarily good”.
