Memoir Excerpt:
“Oh, God, no, this wasn’t happening. THIS WAS NOT HAPPENING! I don’t know this person. Something has taken over her body and transformed her. Angie, my Angie, no longer resides in this walking corpse, this skeleton. She doesn’t live here anymore.’
I poured Angie into my car and took her to the psych ward. While she was there, Gene sat with her at one or two in-house meetings. Xavier and I soldiered in to see her every single day, with her favorite food, and smiles, and earnest talk about how she could start over any time she chose to. On one such visit, I asked her about the contents of her suitcases.
‘It’s all perfectly legal, Mom.’
Collecting myself and keeping calm, I asked myself, if I was living on another planet, or was what she was doing illegal? No matter. It didn’t matter to me because this person who was glibly telling me this was not the person I had raised. This person had no moral compass whatsoever. And from this moment forward I knew that I was dealing with a split personality: two people, my Angie, and this hair-brained addict. I wanted to kill the addict, murder her in her sleep, and watch my Angie rise like a phoenix from the ashes.”