Chapter 6 – Tracy Stone’s Sad Anniversary
Saturday morning January 13, 2007 – 8:00 AM
Tracy Stone was coming unhinged. The former Mrs. Tracy Breslin finally went through with her divorce and she was once again going by her maiden name, Stone, which was an appropriate surname for someone who felt as if she was straddling a ton of bricks on her shoulders.
It was exactly one year to the horrible day that her boyfriend, Fred Miller had been shot and killed for no apparent reason. And even now, one year later, Tracy still had vivid flashbacks of how she collapsed in the driveway and vomited when the police came knocking at her door and, using their standard terminology, informed her that Fred was deceased.
Tracy had been crying all morning, and for the most part she had been crying nonstop for the past year. As time marched on, she couldn’t help but think that it was partially, if not totally, her fault that Fred Miller was dead. But in her own defense, she reasoned; “How the hell was I suppose to know that my husband was gonna have poor Freddie killed?”
Tracy wisely stayed away from Fred’s funeral, since at the time, even though he had only been dead for a few days, there were already rumblings that she somehow played a part in his demise. In fact, not only had she skipped the funeral, but in the past year she hadn’t gone to the cemetery even once to pay her respects. For some reason she just wasn’t ready to confront the sight of Fred’s grave just yet. Somehow she assumed that if she didn’t come face-to-face with the final proof of Fred’s death, then maybe she’d wake up someday to find that it had all been one big year-long bad dream.
Tracy had targeted today as the day that she might finally find the strength to make peace with her past, but when she woke up she realized that she wasn’t quite ready. Instead, she decided that she would keep a vigil at the bedside shrine that she had dedicated to her fallen lover.
Tracy arranged to leave her children with their auntie Beth for the weekend so that she could wallow in her sorrow alone on this very somber anniversary. She couldn’t bear to have her kids witness what a mess she was becoming; even though, it was already much too late for that. The kids might have been young, but they were smart enough to know that they were in for some hard times ahead in their lives.
Much like Tracy, her children had been racked with bad dreams just about every night, ever since the day they learned that their father had been hauled off to jail. In their nightmares, it seemed that they were perpetually reliving the traumatic day when mommy sat them down and told them that daddy had done a bad thing. They just couldn’t comprehend what mommy was saying when she apprised them of the fact that the police had sent daddy to prison, and that he wouldn’t be coming home for a while.
“Sort of like a grown up’s time-out,” she patiently explained.
And now as Tracy reflected back on that awful day when she was forced to break the devastating news to her children, she sobbed at the thought of them growing up without a father, and with a mother who was falling apart at the seams.
The kids were constantly asking her when daddy was coming home, and every time they did, Tracy would look away and simply say; “Someday he’ll be back.” And then she’d reach for the liquor cabinet and cry herself to sleep like a baby.
In fact, from the moment that Tracy learned of Fred’s murder, her life had pretty much dissolved into a drunken shambles. In a rare moment of clarity, she had tried AA meetings, but in the end she lacked the willpower to keep it up, and she eventually began drinking heavily again, as well as dabbling in prescription and illicit drugs; anything to dull the pain she had been enduring for so many years now.
And yet through it all, Tracy still tried her best to be a good mother to her children. After all, she was also an animal-lover, and she owned all kinds of pets, ranging from birds and reptiles, to cats and dogs, and even spidery insects, so she knew what it meant to give and receive unconditional love.
Tracy’s biggest fear for her kids was how she would handle their fragile hearts if, as she suspected, her ex-husband ended up being sent to prison for life. She rued the thought of having to bring them to the State Penitentiary to visit their dad.
“There’s no way I’ll have the strength to do it…their uncles will have to take them,” mumbled Tracy, referring to John Breslin’s brothers.
Tracy realized full well that if her ex-husband ended up being found guilty of murder, she would also be held at least partially responsible by many people, including her children as they grew older, for basically ending his life as well, and this filled her with even more guilt and consternation.
Tracy told the police flat-out that Johnny had said to her; “If Fred doesn’t stop seeing you, it wouldn’t be good for his health.”
However, looking back on the situation in hindsight, Tracy wasn’t sure exactly what her ex-husband’s remarks were. She was positive that he had said something threatening towards Fred, but she couldn’t remember his exact words, and so she told the police what she thought they needed to hear.
Tracy was 100% certain that her ex-husband hated Fred Miller. But at times she wasn’t so sure whether that necessarily meant he was involved in having him killed, and she was tormented by so many waves of self-doubts and changes-of-heart lately that she worried she might self-combust one of these days.
On the one hand, Tracy’s first instinct was to presume that Johnny had something to do with the murder. “Who else would want to kill Freddie?” she’d reason to herself.
But then on the other hand, when Tracy considered Freddie’s temper, and some of the people he had pissed off over the years, she’d agonize; “Well, maybe someone else could have done it.”
And when Tracy was lost in one of these bewildered states, she would start balling and screaming; “What have I done? What have I done? I put my husband in jail…the father of my children. Oh dear God what have I done?”
But none of these considerations changed the fact that Tracy had wanted to divorce John Breslin long before Fred Miller reentered her life. And yet she was also a very insecure, confused individual who even now sometimes still yearned for the love-hate relationship that she had with her ex-husband.
Today however -- on the anniversary of her high school sweetheart’s death, the so-called love of her life -- was not one of those days where she speculated that she might still have feelings for her ex.
Today was a day when Tracy hated John Breslin with a passion. Tracy hated this controlling, manipulative, jerk of a man who somehow convinced her to marry him and have three kids before she finally came to her senses.
Tracy recalled telling Johnny how she was “dead inside” when for a second time in three years she asked for a divorce, and now she was beyond dead, she was a zombie, a shell of a person inhabiting the body of the living dead.
The DA’s office recently informed Tracy that she would be expected to testify when John Breslin’s case finally went to trial, and she resolved in her mind that she would have to tell the truth, or some semblance of the truth, even if it meant putting the father of her children away for life.
However, on days like today, Tracy wasn’t sure whether she could ever face her ex-husband again. Tracy tried to imagine what it would be like seeing him in the courtroom, and she practically collapsed with fear at the mere thought of it.
“God forbid, he walks and comes looking for me,” shuddered Tracy. She didn’t trust herself around John Breslin. They both seemed to have some sort of unnatural control over each other, and in her current state of inner turmoil, despite her animosity toward him, he could probably have convinced her to take him back; especially now that she was struggling financially without his regular paychecks coming in.
“No, that can’t happen…even if I have to embellish the truth a little bit. Johnny’s not walking out of that jail alive if I have anything to say about it. That fuckin’ murderer,” muttered Tracy out loud to herself as she laughed and cried hysterically a
t the same time like a crazy person.
“Who knows, maybe I’ll be dead by then,” stammered Tracy as she washed down two Oxicontin pills with a glass of Jack Daniels whiskey and collapsed onto her sofa where she continued to cry uncontrollably for the rest of the day; a day that would turn out to be…one of the longest days…of her miserable life.