Cindy's Cry For Help

Second, or the event that is the most recent and fucked up would be the shit that went down between dad and Cindy.  It all took place over the course of three days and was started over nothing.  The event that caused Cindy to blow the fuck up and go immediately into meltdown mode is probably not even worth mentioning, but again, for the sake of posterity, I will recount it as follows.

Day one starts out with dad going to get dog food.  He comes back, after being gone for no more than twenty minutes, and Cindy is up in arms.  She accuses him of being gone for hours, speculating, debating and all in all raising hell.  My father, dumbfounded, tries to talk to her with reason, with facts.  But Cindy, being unreasonable, doesn’t want to hear any of it.

She acts like shit is kosher and they decide to go out together to run some errands.  The adult shit that sad unhappy people do on their days off often mixed with copious amounts of television and other garbage that constitutes one’s life until they die.  Cindy at this point seems calm, and for all intents and purposes she appears to be.  However, those who know her and her behavior know also what is brewing.  Beneath her porcelain features lies in wait a storm, a terrible horrible storm full of hatred and anger.

So they go to the store and on their way back she brings up the dog food yet again.  The fucking dog food, she just cannot let it go.  My dad is, again, dumbfounded and again in vain tries to reason with her.  This goes back and forth, becoming more and more heated until Cindy decides to take the steering wheel and violently yank it into oncoming traffic.  This is one time I wish Jesus would have taken the wheel instead.  Impact with the oncoming car is narrowly avoided but the correction causes them to run off the road.  She then freaks out some more and tries to get out of the car, whilst my dad is pleading with her to at least let him drive the 100 yards or so until they arrive at home.  He fails.

So Cindy walks into the distance and my dad heads back to home base.  Unsure of what to do at this moment, and with no true friends to call, he finds it best to call her parents.  Now my dad is crazy as well, but her parents are not.  Good people.  Hardworking people.  Her dad worked his way up the ladder, doing the American dream thing that I so often hear about but rarely see, and ends up owning a business which he sells and makes mad loot off of.  But I digress.

So my dad and her dad are waiting at the house in nervous anticipation, wondering what is to come.  Bree, her daughter who also lives with them, is crying.  She is not afraid for her mom, worried like others might be in a seemingly random and chaotic situation; rather she is afraid of her mom.  Afraid of what this woman, this unpredictable and vengeful woman, will do to them.  Cindy is so unpredictable, so rash and random, that the CIA and MIT would have a hard time trying to gleam a pattern from her.  To track her; to anticipate her next move. To understand her.  The best and brightest would struggle.  Bree knows what is coming and is worried about their physical wellbeing.

And then she appears, gliding into the dining room. She tried to play Joe cool until she saw her dad there.  She then freaks the fuck out.  He, being a dad, gives her some real dad talk, trying to calm her down.  And he does this by giving them both the hard truth.  That shit isn't working between you; you have done all you can, blah blah blah.  Time to move on.  Cindy at this point seems fine and my dad is fine, fine with all of it.  It’s his way out that he says he’s been looking for.  Deceptive peace has settled and her father eventually leaves.

No sooner has the door shut than Cindy looks at my dad and says, so calmly, if you ever involve my parents in my shit again I will fucking kill you in your sleep.  What a keeper dad.  My father then finds it in his best interest to disappear and so he locks himself in the spare bedroom. Cindy then throws all of his shit into the hallway, while screaming obscenities, and then takes a cocktail of drugs and passes out into a light coma.

The next day continues more or less from where the other left off.  My dad is working with her dad in the kitchen.  Doing some good old fashioned home improvement.  Cindy comes in and immediately starts freaking the fuck out yet again.  She does not acknowledge my father during this time, only hers.  She wants my dad gone, fucking gone.  Her dad says relax, chill out.  Get out of the house, I want him fucking gone.  Relax, chill out.  I mean it, get him the fuck out of my house I want him fucking gone.  Relax, chill out.  Dad, get him the fuck out I want him gone.  Cindy, shut the fuck up.  At this point her dad lays down the law, calls her out for being a worthless lazy piece of shit, and letting her know not to contact them anymore, the purse strings are cut.  He leaves. 

And she freaks the fuck out.  What she has been doing up until this point has merely been a taste, a glimpse only at the surface.  She is in full mode meltdown and it is directed at my father.  Dad dives into the spare bedroom again, his refuge, his temple of solitude, while he listens to her cry hysterically before leaving to get her hair cut.  Dad, at this point having been awake for a solid two days, immediately passes out.

And then he wakes up.  Some time has passed, roughly ten hours.  He walks into the hallway and sees bree.  He asks where she is.  She doesn’t know.  No one has heard from her since she left her hair appointment.  And they only heard from her then because the hairdresser, so concerned at Cindys emotional state, the crying and hysterics and the on and on and on decided it best to call her dad and let her know her adult daughter is having a toddler meltdown in the middle of the store. Her Dad tries to talk her down, bring some calm back into the game, but she has none of it.  Instead, she reacts like a paranoid schizophrenic.  You’re all out to get me she accuses.  No one loves me.  You hate me.  Blah Blah Blah.  She then storms off and that was the last time that anyone saw or heard from her.

Now, everyone thought that she would just check into a hotel before her flight in the morning.  Get away from it all and all that.  Cindy has a job where she gets paid big bucks to travel and is frequently gone for weeks at a time.    However, she didn’t bring her suitcase, her make up.  She never goes anywhere without her face.  The thing she did remember to take before she left were two full bottles of Xanax.  And the clothes on her back.

At this point my dad is freaking out because this is not Cindys first rodeo with trying to kill herself.  She has tried previously and to my best guess from anecdotal stories and hearsay to kill herself three times before.  But those were always the typical cry for help.  The I’m going to take this whole bottle of pills, in the living room, before my daughter gets home from school in 20 minutes.  Like trying to drown in a child’s pool surrounded by lifeguards and with a life raft within arm’s reach.  This should not be confused with the more serious way of offing yourself, the loaded shotgun in the mouth in a place where no one will disturb you for quite some time.  These methods of suicide are not the same and should not be confused as such.

So my dad is freaking out but since this aint no one’s first rode with Cindy and her behavior he seems to be the only one concerned.  Her family has unfortunately been dealing with her antics since she was a child.  He calls the police and makes a report and then heads to her parents’ house to set up ground zero.  Base camp. 

Nothing.  No one has heard from her.  She is using cash because all other credit and debit account activity has remained idle.  Clever girl.  This time seems like the real deal and now everyone, except me, get a little bit nervous.  I just don’t give a fuck at this point.  If this is what it takes for my dad to leave then so be it.  Maybe she will find peace at last, and her troubled and sad life will finally come to an end.  It just aint no thang chicken wing.

Dad calls me while on his one man search, and I tell him to go home.  A woman he hated yesterday, a woman who he talked so much shit about has now, in his eyes, become a saint.  A sad and misunderstood individual lonely and without hope.  Pushed to the edge by others, the world always against her, always trying to grind her down.  I immediately verbally bitch slap him through the phone and remind him of what Cindy truly is.  Dangerous and unsaveable.  Defeated, he promises to head home.

Some more hours pass and as the sun is getting ready to rise, drinking some coffee and reading the paper, she calls.  She fucking calls.  She took sixty Xanax bars and she calls.  I knew, as a recovering drug addict myself, that this would be the only thing that saves her and it did.  Her fucking tolerance.  It should also be noted that Cindy is addicted to Xanax and Ambien, and Tylenol pm, and all the other heavy downers that make her fall asleep and stay asleep so she can forget about her life.  But she rallied this night and called my dad to yell at him some more.  This hate, this anger, must be so powerful that in her stupor, her Xanax filled stupor on the edge of death was not even enough to keep her down and out.  She is a fighter, I will give her that.

Through it all, the slurring and yelling and name calling, dad gets a location and he’s out.  He calls the sheriff and they both arrive at the scene at the same time.  Cindy is so fucked up she can’t move so Hollywood style they kick down the door, load her into the EMT and take her to the hospital and then the psych ward. 

This is my father’s third wife.