Haunted by Heather

Tonight, it is Heather's story that sits on my heart. Heather is (please forgive me, Hag) "turning forty-one in prison, facing life without parole." The difference in Heather's life and Merle's song, however, is that Heather's mama didn't "try to steer her right." Thirty years ago, Heather's mama had the face of an angel. ("A little baby doll," one old time vice detective tells me.) Unfortunately, Mama also had a nasty heroine habit that kept her away from her babies and out on the streets searching for a trick to finance her next treat.

So the good folks at Human Services came and rescued Heather and her siblings and sent them to live with foster parents who would raise them right. Heather tells me she doesn't really remember much about those places except that she missed her family desperately and, "Oh, yeah, my first foster daddy taught me how to French kiss." She was seven, or maybe six. One cool thing about Heather is that she relates this information without any trace of self-pity.

Heather and her siblings were shuffled back and forth for the next few years. They'd go to this or that foster home, then their mama would get clean for awhile and they'd go back to live with her. Finally, Mama's rights were terminated. Heather and a couple of her older brothers were farmed out to relatives. Her two younger sisters got adopted. Heather went to live with a distant relative, a right good Christian woman who was unable to bear children of her own.

Heather reports that they were good to her and loved her like their own. She had her own room and pretty clothes, breakfast every morning, supper every night, and church every time the doors were opened. There was only one problem; she missed her mama. And when her new parents told her what an awful woman her mama was, it didn't make Heather hate her. If anything, it made her love and miss her mama more. When she was barely old enough to do so, Heather returned to her mama. It's one of the decisions she wonders about.

In the years between Heather's return to Mama and the intersecting of her life with mine, the story is a familiar one. Too much booze and drugs; too little work and education. Mama still works the streets when she can find someone who's got a few spare bucks and not such good eyesight; she quit looking like a babydoll years ago. Daddy was an alcoholic who got run down in the streets. Heather wryly reports that her last words to him, shouted out a car window as she rode by, were, "Get out of the road, you damned old drunk, before somebody runs you over."

Heather's life was a haze of drugs and alcohol; sometimes she had a home, sometimes she lived on the streets. Her two oldest brothers went to prison. Heather was in and out of jail on petty charges...public intoxication, failure to pay court costs, etc. She went to treatment a time or so, even had a year sober at one point. She got married, too, but they'd been split up for awhile when Heather came to jail the last time.

I met Heather a couple of days after that final incarceration. I knew she was coming off the sauce, so I stopped by to see her. And I will never forget the words she said to me, "I just keep seeing his face and thinking about his mama. I wonder if he had a mama?" I didn't realize what a rare sentiment Heather was expressing. Now I do. I never heard those words from another inmate.

I visited her almost every day. I took her a Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and she began to share her story with me. I learned that she had gotten out of jail for some petty charge or another just a few days before she returned and I met her. I learned that for the past year she had consumed at least a gallon of vodka every day. I learned that one of her older brothers had recently returned from prison and that the two of them had joined a few friends to consume a bottle or two in the alley. I learned that a man had been killed and that she and her brother had been charged with murder.

As the weeks progressed, I continued to visit her. I listened as she grappled with what her life had become and struggled with guilt and fear, justice and retribution. I looked into her eyes when she returned from court the first day his family was there; the day she learned that he did indeed have a mama. I heard the anguish in her voice when she carefully explained to me that of course her mama couldn't come to court or come to visit her because, "she has some outstanding warrants."

Together, Heather and I tried to salvage some meaning from this senseless, horrific incident. That first morning she kept saying, "It's so surreal; it's just all so surreal." We discussed religion and spirituality and AA, and we talked about seemingly simple but gut-wrenching questions of ethics and morality. Which is more important, loyalty or truth?

I wish I could say that together we discovered some easy answers. We did not. Through the years I have learned again and again that there are no easy answers.