If You Only Knew by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page B

perplexed by the proposition.
    â€œWhat’s the problem?” the medical examiner wondered.
    Don Rogers’s body . . . it was already gone.

CHAPTER 10
    EVERY RECOVERING ALCOHOLIC KNOWS there’s a sleeping dragon, a beast, hibernating inside his or her soul. Even if the person finds sobriety, dries out and goes on to lead a productive, alcohol-free life, one day at a time, that beast sits, patiently waiting, ready and willing to breathe fire once again when a vulnerable moment arises. Since Vonlee had returned to the upper Midwest to live with Don and Billie Jean, she not only started drinking again, but she’d rattled the sleeping dragon wide awake.
    While she had been back in Tennessee at her grandmother’s house, Vonlee later explained, she had given everything up. Vonlee had walked away, she said, from a “three-hundred-thousand-dollar town house” that her old boyfriend was willing to sign over to her in place of her going home to sober up. While living inside that bubble consisting of Denver and Chicago, and running an escort service, Vonlee considered that she had “hit [her] bottom.”
    â€œI was going to meetings. I was going to therapy. I was doing all of these things while back home.” And through that, Vonlee said, she had “made an understanding with God,” her higher power. She’d pleaded to God while immersed in her addiction that she wanted out of it all. “Okay, God, this is my bottom . . . ,” Vonlee had told herself while ripping and running in Chicago before taking off for home. “And if this is not my bottom? Please, God, take me there.”
    The chaos her life had taken on since moving in with Billie Jean was perhaps that new bottom she had asked God for, Vonlee began to think as those days and long nights at the casino carried on. Maybe Chicago and Denver were not enough? Perhaps God wanted Vonlee to see another layer of living hell that would finally shake her into believing she had a drinking problem to begin with and that things could not possibly get any worse.
    With Don dead, the police asking Billie questions, and Vonlee being around it all, feeling guilty and a part of what seemed to be, at the least, some moral culpability in Don’s death, Vonlee asked herself, Is this it? Is this my bottom?
    One of the main issues for Vonlee was that she had been blind drunk herself on the night they returned from the casino to find Don on the kitchen floor.
    If I wasn’t drunk, would he have had a chance? Vonlee wondered now.
    The guilt ate at her.
    â€œI was literally in another world while all of this was going on,” Vonlee said. “I made an appointment to go to the psychiatrist because I just couldn’t deal with it.”
    Don’s kids, even Billie Jean’s, were asking Vonlee what was wrong with her. She seemed so distraught. “Did you know Don that well, Vonlee? You are really taking this hard.”
    Anytime somebody said something to Vonlee, she broke down. She couldn’t handle hearing Don’s name.
    â€œSomeone would say, ‘How well did you know Don?’ and I would bust out bawling like a child.”
    There was a time a few days after Don’s death when all Vonlee could do was pop Xanax her psychiatrist had put her on and wash those pills down with vodka.
    â€œI’d get up off the couch only to take more Xanax, have a drink, and then [I’d] pass back out.”
    She couldn’t believe what had happened—Don dying the way he had.
    But if Don was dead when Billie Jean and Vonlee entered the house, why all the guilt? Why was Vonlee harboring so much responsibility for Don’s death? What wasn’t Vonlee sharing with anyone?
    Billie Jean saw Vonlee on the couch one morning. “Look at you!” she said. “Pull your damn self together.”
    â€œI’m . . . I’m . . . ,” Vonlee tried to say.
    Billie Jean got down to Vonlee’s eye level, put