Maddie & Clyde…

Attempting relaxation after a long stressful day with an episode of Thriller, Dialogues With Death, a burgundy sherpa-lined velour throw blanket, and a scoop of dark chocolate ice cream.  
 
Since my little sister Maddie was a baby, I’ve always treated her like my little buddy.  As soon as she could walk, I’d take her hands and dance her around or pick her up and twirl in circles with her, her wild red curls lifting in the air around her, and carefully drop her onto her back on a mattress from about a foot above it so she’d squeal and laugh with excitement.  I’ve always adored the thrill of a little freefall and then a soft, bouncy landing.  She always brought me little story books to read to her and most of the time, we were laughing.  I imagined she thought of me as just someone to have fun with, so I was quite surprised the first time she called me wanting to talk to me and no one else, after the first traumatic event of her life, when she was just 3 years old.  
 
Well, really, given her age at the time, it was my mom who called me, and in a panicked tone, hurriedly relayed to me the details of the evening.  It was the Fourth of July, and my mom and sisters still lived in Louisiana.  My mother’s husband, Beaufort, who was the kids’ father, had accompanied them to the town fireworks show.   Beaufort and my mom went to do different things there, and my mom asked him to take one of the girls with him.  He chose Maddie, saying she’d be easier because she wasn’t a baby anymore.  As he took Maddie around, a truck full of fireworks accidentally caught on fire, next to where they stood, and within a very short time, spread to a few other trucks full of fireworks that were lined up next to it.  Flames flew all through the nearby sky in many directions, guided by the exploding fireworks launching from the trucks.  
 
Beaufort said he was going to look for my mom and baby Aria, and left 3 year old Maddie just a few feet away from the disaster area and told her to wait there.  She was immediately screaming and crying for him and in absolute panic.  She wandered around through the pandemonium looking for him as other screaming people dashed madly about and the flames continued to spread nearby.  Finally, my mom found her and took her to safety, and according to my mom, as soon as she picked her up, Maddie just kept screaming and crying that she wanted to talk to me, of all people, her nineteen year old sister.  She kept screaming my name and so my mom called me as soon as they arrived home, told me the above-written anecdote so fast I could barely understand it, and handed the phone to the sobbing toddler.  That was the first time I talked with Maddie on the phone.  I had a friend over at the time and was about to watch a movie with him, but wasn’t about to try to cut this call short.  As soon as she got on the line, Maddie kept crying and telling me in her frantic little toddler voice about the fire that was everywhere and the trucks and the fireworks and the noise of it all and how everyone was running everywhere and she couldn’t find her mommy or daddy.  Her howls came all the way from her gut and didn’t stop for quite some time.  I had trouble understanding what she was saying, but was able to piece it together after some repetition, as thoughts about traumatic events, when someone’s still in shock, tend to cycle around in repeating circles.  My eyes swelled with moisture as I thought of this tiny child having faced something so frightening, and all alone.  But I was more than a little bit touched that she chose me to turn to for comfort.  Though I had no idea why she did.
 
Since that evening, Maddie’s had a terrible fear of fireworks.  She doesn’t attend fireworks shows, and doesn’t like when she can hear them from inside her house.  Since that evening, every time the poor kid’s had something traumatic happen to her, or even something that’s just made her very sad, she’s called me crying.  I’ve tried my best to comfort her over the years, and I must say, she’s had some horrific things happen to her for someone so young.   All I can do is try to be there for her.
 
I woke up early this morning and decided to check my phone, as I’d forgotten to check it at all yesterday.  I go several days without checking my phone at times, but have been attempting to be better about it.  I immediately saw a text from my mom from last night at around 2 a.m., reading:  
 
 
 

Need to talk.  Maddie lied about weekend plans & went to San Antonio w/ Vinny.  Police arrested him outside local mall with several knives, including a very large one w/ blood on it.  Maddie had a shotgun hidden at her side.  They were attempting to sleep in parked car.  She was not arrested, but banned from mall for a year.  She is very upset.  Wants to leave for a while & wants to see you.  I worry because he has threatened us w/ violence before.  I don’t know why she looked him up again.
 

My first coherent thought, upon reading it, was HOLY FUCK!!!!
 
Called my mom first to get her version, but there was no answer.  Texted Maddie, as I figured she’d still be asleep, which, in fact, she turned out to be.  Maddie surprised us all by earning enough credits to graduate one semester early from high school.  Her exams were last week and she passed every single one this time.  I was very proud, and called to congratulate her on Saturday.  She said she was in a hotel room in San Antonio with friends.  Didn’t say which friends, and I didn’t see the need to ask, but I did notice there was no background noise on her end, which there usually is, in abundance, when she’s with her friends.  She’s not one to step outside of a loud room to answer her phone.  I’ve figured since that “friends” probably meant just Vinny, who’s pretty quiet in most situations.  She was likely with Vinny, just the two of them, in a hotel room.  Vinny’s a boyfriend she had about a year and a half ago.  Their relationship ended because Maddie developed an interest in a certain German exchange student, and Vinny responded by sending Maddie a bunch of threatening messages, telling her he was going to break into her house in the middle of the night, kill her mom and grandma, rape and murder her sister Aria, and then rape and murder Maddie.  She played the messages to my mom, and my mom called his father, ended up getting into a huge argument with the man, who defended his son, and then blocked the kid’s number from Maddie’s phone so he couldn’t call her anymore.  Vinny then began sending Aria messages on facebook, conversed with her at length about some of the teen fiction series Aria had been posting about, and asked her to meet him somewhere to talk more about the books, he said.  Aria told my mom she was meeting him and my mom freaked out, appropriately, and told Aria what he had threatened.  Aria understood and didn’t go see him, stopped talking to him.  That was the last we’d heard about him until this incident.
 
I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I tried getting some paper work done, but didn’t manage to get very far.  Too distracted.  I looked for news articles online about Vinny’s arrest, but didn’t find any.  Finally my mom called, when I was dead tired again and failing at napping.  Gave me all the gory details.  Police called her last night around midnight and told her to come pick up her daughter in the parking lot of the mall that’s just about three minutes away by car.  When she arrived, five police cars were gathered and Maddie was in the back of one of the cars being interviewed.  Vinny was being driven away in handcuffs.  I asked my mom if she knew what the exact charges were against Vinny.  She said she wasn’t sure, but she thought it was possession of an illegal weapon, the machete with blood on it, which Vinny told the cops he had used on a hunting trip recently, and forgotten to take out of his car.  He said the blood was animal blood.  Which I think it likely is, given that all the other knives the police had found were small hunting knives designed for tasks such as skinning, cutting meat off of bones, etc., and Vinny lives out on a big ranch near Dilley, TX, where hunting is quite common.  My mom told me once again how Maddie had been asking for me last night as soon as she picked her up, and then asking to come visit me.  
 
Maddie called me when she woke up in the early afternoon, a few minutes after I got off the phone with my mom, and was very upset at first, but then began to calm down quite a bit.  She said my mom was mistaken about the gun being a shotgun, that it was a hunting rifle registered to Vinny, that he was allowed to legally have in his car, and that the gun was nowhere near her, that it wasn’t hidden at her side like my mom said.  She said she’d spent the weekend with Vinny in San Antonio and then he’d driven her back to Laredo, but didn’t feel like driving himself back to Dilley yet, so they parked at the mall and watched cartoons on his phone and she said she’d stay the night with him in his car.  Police came with flashlights in their windows and asked Vinny to step out of his car.  Asked him about the knives and he explained what each one was for, then the rifle, and he showed that it was legal and registered to him and lawful to have in his vehicle, and they seemed to be in agreement about all of those things, but it was the machete that wasn’t legal for him to carry around, and the blood on it made them very suspicious.  They asked them to get out of the car and proceeded to search the car more thoroughly, most likely looking for drugs, I would assume, of which there were none.  When Maddie got out of the car and was surrounded by all the cops, she began crying and shaking and she says they took her aside and were really nice to her.  They told her they weren’t charging her with anything, but mall security took her information and told her she wasn’t allowed to come to that mall for a year.  Which sucks because it’s the only mall in the area, and she was about to look for employment there, since it’s within walking distance from her house, not many businesses are, and she doesn’t have a car or a license.  I told her the charges against Vinny weren’t very serious in this instance, and that as long as the blood on the machete was determined to be animal blood, he probably wouldn’t be detained for long or given anything heavier than probation and/or community service.  
 
I thought of booking her a ticket to come see me soon, as she wishes, but found out she’s scheduled for dental surgery next week to have two wisdom teeth removed.  Apparently, one of them is about to grow into her nerve, and her oral surgeon told her if she doesn’t get them out very soon, she may develop severe nerve damage and lose sensation in her jaw.  So I really think she should stay for her surgery, and no one’s sure about her recovery time, because one of the teeth is so impacted, I was told, that the surgeon may have to break her jaw a bit to get it out.  So recovery time could be anywhere from a couple of days to a few weeks.  I don’t feel comfortable planning a visit for her when there are so many uncertainties.  She also seems to be calming down quite a bit, a lot sooner than she expected, and I told her I really don’t foresee any long term consequences besides her being banned from the mall for a year and the employment prospects reduced a bit, and mom likely being extremely opposed to her seeing Vinny.  I asked her about the threats of violence he made a couple of years ago and how she feels she can trust him now.  She said he made those threats because he’d gone off his medication.  I tried to very casually ask what he was being medicated for.  She very casually answered, “Schizophrenia.”  Without trying to seem like I was lecturing her, I tried my best to discourage her from spending too much time with him and encourage her to spend time with her other friends more.  But I know she’s going to see who she’s going to see.  Don’t think I can remedy that.  I want to appear to be on her side completely with a matter like this, so she’ll be more likely to talk to me about what’s really going on.  
 
I finally napped in the early evening for several hours, and awoke with the same dull pain on all sides of my head that I fell asleep with.  Felt like a zombie, but had to take a few more calls from my mom and Maddie.  To my relief, Maddie seemed to be feeling pretty normal by the late evening, and I told both her and my mom that I honestly think we should hold off on planning a trip for her here, so she can recover properly from her surgery, and that after that, she’ll likely not still be thinking about this incident very much, and that I think she should proceed with finding employment as she intended to do as soon as high school ended.  I am not suggesting college because Maddie does not want to go at all, and I have no faith in her actually attending or completing any classes, so I don’t think she should waste my mother’s money on it.  I’ve had so many friends who’ve spent the past decade starting and paying for college classes every semester, growing bored of them a few weeks in, every semester, and ending up many thousands of dollars in debt with no degree whatsoever to show for it.  Maddie has a very similar personality to many of them.  I know she wants to go to beauty school at some point, and I think that’s a good idea for her, as she’s very good at doing hair and makeup, and that would at least be some type of skilled labor.  But I really do think she should get a taste of the working world first, as this may give her some of the maturity and real world perspective I think she could greatly benefit from at this point.  
 
I also suggested, for the sake of her prospective employment, that she and my mom try to appeal the mall ban by asking my two uncles, my mom’s two brothers, one being a long-time police detective and the other being the former county attorney and now a federal prosecutor, to write letters on Maddie’s behalf to the chief of mall security explaining that Maddie was not charged with anything or wielding any weapons whatsoever, that she’s a fine young woman, an innocent young woman, and ask if they could please lift the mall ban only insofar as to allow Maddie to seek employment, and have her agree not to hang out there casually.  Maddie wouldn’t lose anything out of it, and there’s a chance mall security would say yes.  Wherever she works will have to be okay with her pink mohawk.  
 
Ah, my head’s finally stopped hurting and I’m looking forward to a long warm shower.  I treated myself to this swimsuit tonight, in burnished shell.  I adore blushy nudes.  It was originally $127, but is down to less than $40 with its clearance price and additional discount.  When things seem depressing, I try to find little things to look forward to.  Oh, who am I kidding?  I shop!  😉