Shortly after the holidays, Jesse and I returned to Virginia. Everything went on as usual with Jesse and his friends. At least I had enough sense not to be smoking and drinking while pregnant. Still subjected to the second-hand smoke in the apartment, but there was not much I could do about that.
It was still winter and very cold. One evening after dark, Jesse and I were driving to meet up with his friends when I suddenly saw Mom’s car parked at an apartment complex. Situated near the main road, but elevated slightly on top of a grassy knoll. You could see the lot lit up a short distance before actually being in front of it.
I was so excited to see her car sitting there and urged Jesse to pull in the lot. Of course, he refused and we argued. For some reason, he decided to backhand me across the face. I started grabbing anything I could get ahold of in that car, the turn signal knob, the gearshift, radio knobs, anything I could break off. We struggled and he continued to backhand me while he was driving.
We had barely passed the apartment parking lot when I reached for the door handle and jumped out. The dirt surrounding the complex was still fairly soft because of the new construction. There was an embankment with trees at the bottom. When I jumped from the car, all I remember is curling up in a ball. Being 5 months pregnant, I didn’t want to kill the baby. I ended up at the base of a large tree.
Jesse kept going, never turning back at all to see whether or not I was okay. When I got up, I brushed myself off and climbed the dirt bank back to the apartment complex. Assuming Mom was in the apartment directly in front of her car, I knocked and miraculously she opened the door.
It was the first time I had seen her in several months and I know she must have been shocked at what I looked like after rolling down a bank and pregnant on top of that. At least she invited me in. Neither of us really knew what to say, but she did express her disappointment. Making it perfectly clear of how I had thrown my life away. She was right, but there was no explanation of how things had went so haywire so fast.
She invited me to have a seat in her living room and went to the closet to retrieve a wrapped gift she had purchased in case she ran into me during Christmas. It was a pair of socks. At the time, I probably needed them really bad. The visit was short and I hated to ask her for a ride back to my apartment. Jesse never came back to look for me and never once thought about how I was going to get home.
I wasn’t accustomed to living like this. My whole existence had been turned upside down. With my situation the only thing I could really do was hold on.
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