My Saving Grace

By Mary Missig

Life has challenged David Allen in most ways imaginable. Despite losing everything after serving in Vietnam, David continues his life, homeless, on the streets of New York City-- holding onto the hope of better things to come. This is his story about overcoming all obstacles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Missig
• Release date: Jul 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476082080

Mary Missig

Mary grew up in Oak Harbor, Ohio and now resides in Santa Monica, California. She has a bachelor's degree in Marketing from John Carroll University and works in the marketing research industry. She also is an Ironman triathlete. My Saving Grace is her first novel.

Book preview

My Saving Grace

By Mary Missig

Copyright 2012 Mary Missig

Smashwords Edition

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Chapter 1

I wasn’t always this way. Homeless. Living on the streets. Questioning what it means to be human, to be alive. My life has become a series of shameful moments: shaking a paper cup with a few pennies in the bottom at strangers’ faces, digging through trash dumpsters to find a few scraps of food, splashing my face with water from a drinking fountain in place of a shower.

Sometimes I forget that I had a wife and a child on the way. I had a relatively comfortable apartment with all the luxuries: heat, electricity, food on the table, a bed to cozy up in at night, the works. I didn’t have to worry about where my next meal was coming from or where I could hide out that night to catch a few z’s. Life on the street is a different world, a world of despair and shame. It’s a world outside of the rest of the world. It’s a world in the way of everyone else’s world. And most importantly, it’s a world you can only understand if you’ve been there.

Growing up I didn’t have the ideal childhood but I had a family. I had a roof over my head and the promise of food on the table at each meal. Life was simple and I was happy to be living it. My home life might not have been perfect but my mother and father were madly in love. They spent every minute they could together. Despite the long hours my father worked down at the dock, the exhaustion would simply melt from his face as soon as he stepped in the door and laid eyes on my mother. They were crazy about each other and couldn’t get enough of each other. For me, this just meant I had to fight harder for my father’s attention.

They had married young, which wasn’t out of the ordinary for the time. My father had met my mother when he was fifteen on Coney Island. My mother had told me their story so many times. She enjoyed recounting and reliving her earlier days. It seemed to be a release for her, a chance to go back in time and experience first love all over again. I had heard the story so many times I didn’t even listen to the words anymore, I just sat there smiling, mesmerized by the glow radiating from her own smile as she strolled down memory lane.

As for the story, it was a chilly day in early September when my father met my mother. The summer sun still burned a bright ring among the clouds but the heat of its rays didn’t penetrate the crisp chill of the fall winds that had moved in. There was a whisper of the season’s change in the air. As my mother was stepping down from the Ferris wheel, she dropped her scarf as she was shielding her eyes from the bright sun bouncing off the bay. It was a soft and silky red scarf and the wind swallowed it right up. It floated in rhythm with the quick bursts of air coming off the water, like a red firefly. My father, standing next in line to ride, reacted quickly once he saw that flash of red floating away. He bounded down the pier, the wooden floorboards creaking as he pursued the bait. He reached out several times to reel it in, but to no avail. My mother describes the scene as if a child were chasing a butterfly. Hands outstretched, yearning for wonder and awe but never quite grasping it. Fortunately for the story, my father did end up snatching the scarf from its escape. Full of pride, my father jogged back down the dock with the scarf in hand and a smile beaming from his face. He was a little out of breath so when he saw my mother up close for the first time all he could say was wow as he handed her the scarf and peered into her deep blue eyes. After a short pause, my father asked my mother to accompany him on the next ride. She obliged and in one spin around the Ferris wheel, they knew they were meant for each other. My mother kept that very scarf for years to come hidden away in her top drawer with my great grandmother’s rosary tightly wrapped inside. My father proposed to my mother only a year and a half after that fateful Ferris wheel ride, when he was seventeen.

I was born about twelve months later, but about six weeks premature. My mother almost didn’t make it through childbirth and I weighed just a hair over five pounds. At the time, my mother and father had very little money so I was not born in a hospital but rather was born in our apartment with my father handling the delivery. I was extremely lucky to make it being so small. I sometimes wonder why I made it.

After that fateful delivery day, my father quickly nursed my mother back to health. As I clung to life with tiny lungs the size of guitar picks, my father focused more on the rehabilitation of my mother than me. He was upset that my life had put my mother’s life in danger. Luckily, it took only a few days for my mother to return to health so she could begin to feed me properly. Any longer and I would not have survived the neglect. My mother’s heart ached over what had almost happened with her pregnancy but she also understood my father’s concern. As I grew older, my father looked at me only with jealousy. He wanted my mother all to himself. He didn’t like the fact there were two men in her life. My mother, on the other hand, couldn’t find it in herself to confront my father and create any conflict. She just wanted both of us to be happy and I played it off pretty well that I was happy, despite lacking a solid father figure.

In order for my parents to have time alone together they needed to keep me occupied. My mother had a love for music so she enrolled me in piano lessons at the age of three. I caught on naturally and by age five my parents bought me my very own violin. It was a beat-up, used violin from the Salvation Army, but I didn’t know the difference. I was captivated by the beautiful sounds I could make by sliding two strings together. I would play all day and all night. My tiny little fingers were like magic, every movement a new sound. I caught on so quickly that I began to grow bored during my lessons. My instructor never taught me anything new. We always went over the same scales and melodies. In my opinion, I think she was so old and deaf that she couldn’t hear the progress I was making. After my lessons I would satisfy my hunger for a challenge by creating my own melodies. I would dance my fingers across the strings any which way that felt right at the time. The violin filled me with purpose and joy and I played as often I as could. I would often play myself to sleep at night to drown out the noise of the bed board cracking against the wall across the hall in my parents’ bedroom.

At school, I didn’t spend much time with other kids, as I was too preoccupied with my music. As a result, I didn’t have a lot of friends. By the time I reached high school I was playing in a small independent orchestra. We did small events, mainly performing in churches and small concert halls around the city. When I entered high school Ms. Valencia, my music teacher, told me I had a very special gift for music and that I should consider going to Juilliard. I had never heard of this school before and after I learned that it was a prestigious school for performing arts, my heart was set and my dream defined. I had never wanted anything so badly in my entire life. I started working part-time at the dock with my father after school to start saving. My father thought I was crazy. He thought Juilliard was a school for girls and that it was much too expensive and he would not have his son attending such a school. But this was my dream and I was persistent. I kept working at the docks to save money and, most importantly, I had my mother on my side. My father would eventually give in to my mother, he always did. He just couldn’t help himself.

Chapter 2

Even at a young age, I knew the uncontrollable passion between my mother and father would result in an unplanned pregnancy some day. I was sixteen years old and my mother was expecting my future little brother. My father was furious because I could tell he didn’t want another child, he never really wanted me in the first place. My mother, however, was overjoyed. She was excited for the new baby but also excited for me. She wanted me to have a companion. She could see that I didn’t receive as much attention as I deserved, even though she cared about me deeply and showered me with her affection when she could. I might be lucky if my father would ask me about my day. I, on the other hand, was torn about the new baby. I wanted a companion, but this companionship would probably not take shape until a number of years down the road. I pictured myself stuck taking care of the newest member of our family, changing diapers and holding the small delicate warm body against my chest, rocking the newborn to sleep at night while my father made love to my mother.

As the pregnancy progressed, my mother’s health declined. She had weakened so much that she had to stay in bed all day. Her skin was pale and her eyes had lost their luster. I was worried sick because I knew my mother had trouble during my birth and things were looking worse this time around and we still couldn’t afford a hospital stay. My father had to cut down his hours to stay home and tend to her. My father was a rough, rugged man. He had a sharp jawbone, which he exercised by yelling at me. His eyes had grown sunken over the years with a deep vengeance, the remnants of his anger over my birth. He had a permanent layer of dirt under his fingernails from doing manual labor his whole life. He didn’t take any crap from anyone, except when it came to my mother. He was a different person around her. When she took to being sick, he expressed great concern and there was a renewed gentleness about him as he moved about the room to make my mother comfortable. As my mother’s condition continued to deteriorate, my father’s roughness also seemed to fade. During this time, he spoke little to my mother or me. He would only whisper words of reassurance in my mother’s ear every once in a while. It appeared that the fear of the complications from my own birth had attached itself to my father like a leech and would not let go. It was like a piece of him was missing. He moved without a purpose, dragging his limbs from room to room, dragging himself to the dock and back everyday. His one passion in life was fighting for her life. He was hanging by a single thread, the deflating breaths of my mother’s existence. It was as if her condition was contagious and he had caught an even worse case.

One night I heard a scream coming from my parents’ bedroom. My mother had started going into labor, eight weeks early. My father scurried around the apartment getting clean linens, water, everything to deliver the baby and make my mother as comfortable as possible. My father seemed surprisingly calm, as he knew what he was doing. He had delivered me in this very same apartment just sixteen years ago.

I decided I didn’t want to watch or get in the way so instead I started playing my mother’s favorite song on my violin. While playing, I got lost in the music. Every sound, every note took me farther and farther away into a dreamland where my father was playing catch with me on the front lawn. Where our family had moved to the countryside and my mother was calling us from the porch to have a glass of lemonade she had just freshly squeezed. A world where my father actually seemed like the kind of gentleman who would run down the pier to rescue a stranger’s scarf on a windy day. A place where the sky was blue and the warm sun reflected off the crystal clear waters of the pond where our small rowboat was tied to a tiny dock. I imagined myself jumping off the dock and feeling the cool splash, refreshing my soul. Suddenly, though, I was jarred from my dream and dumped back into reality. One of my strings had popped and I stopped playing. Reaching to re-attach the string, I realized how eerily quiet it had become in the apartment. My stomach dropped to my feet, my instincts knew something was not quite right. I swallowed the lump in my throat and tiptoed into my parents’ room. I will never forget the sight I saw that night as I peered into my mother’s room.

I could see the outline of my mother, lying still. A small body, my new baby brother was placed gently on her arm. They both looked so peaceful. Stepping closer in the darkness I saw how tiny my little brother was, about the size of my father’s hand, and that he was still covered in blood, as were the sheets beneath my mother. My mother’s body was limp and lifeless and as I bent over to get a closer look I peered into her bloodshot eyes, seemingly frozen in time, filled with both pain and peace. I gently lifted her arm from her side and placed her hand in mine. Her hand was still warm and I knelt beside the bed, clutching my mother’s hand against my heart. I