Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again Read online

  And then I saw something I recognized on the floor of the closet behind some shoes. Two familiar eyes staring back at me.

  It was the bright red face I remembered from that night.

  Instantly I knew it wasn’t the devil. It was just a large, framed drawing of an old conquistador, his face painted red for battle, his helmet sprouting two horns.

  I hadn’t seen the devil after all. It had only been a stupid painting my stepdad used to scare me in order to amuse himself.

  One of the terrible mysteries of my childhood had been solved, but even so I didn’t feel any great sense of relief in that moment. If anything, I just felt more confused. I may not have seen the devil, but I was still afraid of him, even if I didn’t know for sure if he was real. I was scared of a lot of things as a kid—scared of the dark, scared of empty rooms, scared of everything. Yes, I read my Bible, same as all the other children, but the scriptures were just words to me, and the Lord’s message of love and protection wasn’t really getting through.

  I was taught that God loved me, and that He would save me, and that if I believed in His grace and power, the world couldn’t hurt me.

  But nothing in the little life I had led convinced me that was true.

  WHEN I SAID I like to talk a lot, I wasn’t kidding. I’ve always been a questioner, curious about the world and eager to know why things are the way they are. As a child I talked so much and asked so many questions, my first-grade teacher had to come up with a plan to keep me quiet. She cut a piece of loose-leaf paper into five strips and handed them to me.

  “Crystal, every time you want to say something, you have to give me one of the strips,” she said. “When the last strip is gone, you can’t talk anymore.”

  Not talk anymore? That would be torture. So I carefully managed my strips to make sure I didn’t run out. But within fifteen minutes the first four strips were gone.

  That’s when I took out my scissors and cut the remaining strip into five new strips. I thought that was pretty clever, but my teacher didn’t. She took away my strips and told me I had to be quiet for the rest of the day.

  I don’t know why I was such a talker. Maybe it’s because, when I was born, I almost didn’t make it. I was born a month prematurely in an emergency cesarian. My mom was in labor for twenty-four hours, and when a monitor showed my heart rate dropping, the doctors couldn’t wait any longer. I came out weighing just 4 pounds 11 ounces, and my mother says I was an absurdly tiny thing. Even so, she tells me, I was adorable, like a little china doll with bright red hair and emerald green eyes. One of the nurses was so startled by my appearance, she told my mom, “You know, if that baby had been born a hundred years ago with that red hair and green eyes, she would have been burned at the stake.”

  My mom told her to be quiet and shooed her out of the room.

  The doctors later told my mother I had what they called a failure to thrive, which meant I was barely surviving in my first few weeks on Earth. The problem wasn’t only that I was undersized; it was that I came into the world wanting to do things my own way. I refused the bottle, and I was impossible to force-feed. The best my mom could do was feed me tiny bits of formula through a little straw. I was so thin and fragile, my skin hung loose like a baby sharpei’s. The doctors may have called it failure to thrive; my mom calls it stubbornness.

  I guess once I pulled through, I was just so excited to be alive I couldn’t stop yammering about every little thing.

  It seems that’s a pattern in my life: almost die, pull through, then do a lot of talking.

  When my mother finally got to take me home, she slept with me on her chest for the first six months. Sometimes when I cried I’d have trouble breathing or stop breathing altogether, and my mom would walk me around the room until I was calm and breathing again. My dad, who was thrilled to have a little daughter, tried to pitch in when he could, but my mom wouldn’t let me out of her sight, not even for a minute. Finally a doctor told her to put me in another room, lock the door, and let me be. My mom refused. The doctor eventually convinced her to at least put me in a bassinet, which she pulled up tight against her bed.

  I was so frail and tiny in those early months, my mother couldn’t be sure I’d survive. One doctor was kind enough to stop by our house on his way home from work every night to check up on me. After a few months, my mother told him she appreciated his kindness, but there was no way she could pay him.

  “Do you think I’d charge you to come see the prettiest red-haired baby in the world?” he told her.

  My mother says now she never knew what it meant to truly love someone until she met me.

  And because of that love, I finally began to thrive. I was still teeny tiny, but I was strong. I was walking by eight months. Around that time I said my first word—“Ma”—and I pretty much haven’t stopped talking since.

  BOY, DID I love my mom and dad. I’m sure most kids think this, but I thought they were the most beautiful couple on the planet. My mother was so pretty, with her long, straight strawberry blond hair and the way she was always smiling and laughing and making everyone around her feel good. And my dad, to me, was the coolest guy I knew. Handsome, charming, confident, the life of any room he walked into. He always called me Sugar Bear, and I can’t tell you how wonderful it felt that he had a special name for me.

  I was also showered with love by my mother’s mom, my Grandma Ernie. She was always visiting us in Oklahoma or having me stay with her in San Antonio, where she lived, and when we were together, she doted on me like I was her favorite thing in the world. We’d pick flowers in her lush garden or watch the cows graze near her property. I remember she had these bright, colorful muumuus she always wore, and I loved getting underneath them and hiding from the world.

  “Has anyone seen Crystal?” my grandma would say, and I’d giggle beneath the muumuu.

  Grandma Ernie was a beautiful piano player, and she taught local children to play on her upright Everett piano. Today, I have that wood-paneled Everett in the living room of my home. It’s out of tune, but you can still play it. And whenever one of my kids does, I think about my Grandma Ernie and how much she loved me and how much I loved her.

  Thank goodness I had my mom and my grandma, because growing up I didn’t have a lot of other friends. In fact, for a spell, I had none. I guess my insistence on doing things my own way didn’t sit well with the neighborhood kids. Early on my mom would invite other children to come over, but I was so bossy I’d never let them play with my toys. Instead, I made them sit there and watch me play with them. After a while they just stopped coming by.

  My mom remembers one time, when I was three or four, that I insisted she dress me in my prettiest dress and do up my hair and even put a tiny bit of makeup on me, so that I could sit on our front porch and wait for a friend to come by. Mind you, I had no plans for a playdate; I just sat there hoping some kid would pass by and want to come in. My mom watched me on the porch, blowing dandelions and waiting for a friend who never came, and she said it broke her heart.

  When I did get the chance to make new friends, I often messed it up. My mom enrolled me in a ballet class, and I couldn’t have been more excited to go. I slipped on my little tutu and skipped all the way to the studio. Once I got there, I was fascinated by how sleek and shiny the wooden floor was, and a strange thought popped into my head—I wondered how many girls I could knock over if I threw myself across the floor like a bowling ball. I aimed myself at a group of five or six girls standing in the middle of the studio, got a good little run going, and slid across that floor with a smile on my face. I think I knocked at least four of them down . . . the first time.

  After class, the ballet teacher kindly asked my mom not to bring me back.

  I wasn’t mean, just mischievous. For some reason I also believed I was on equal footing with all the adults in my life, so I was always asking questions and making suggestions and acting all grown up. I remember playing this board game I loved, Candy Land, with my Uncle Chris, who
was in the Navy. It is a simple game where you draw colored cards and move your piece around the board on colored squares. Well, before Uncle Chris and I sat down to play, I stacked the deck. I set it up so that I’d get all the cards I needed to fly around the board and beat him easily. I was three years old, and back then I thought I was brilliant for devising such a scheme. My uncle didn’t catch on for a while, but eventually he did. And when he did, he got up and stopped playing.

  “You’re a cheater,” he told me, “and I’m not going to play with you anymore.”

  I was stung by what he said, but he was right—I was a little cheater.

  I was also a kidnapper.

  When I was five, I went to a day care center in the morning and kindergarten in the afternoon. One day we had a show-and-tell planned for kindergarten, and I got another one of my brilliant ideas. There was a girl in my day care, a little younger than me, who I really liked, and I figured I’d bring her with me to school. Not so she could watch the show-and-tell, but so she could be my show-and-tell. When it came time to get on the bus that shuttled us to kindergarten, I bundled her up and snuck her aboard. In class, I sat her next to me and waited for the show to begin. It didn’t take long for the teacher to notice an extra little face, and she sent us to the principal, Mr. Booker.

  “Who is this girl?” Mr. Booker asked.

  I lied and said she was my cousin. I figured if they thought she was my cousin, they might let her stay. Mr. Booker called the day care and finally straightened everything out. I was sad, because the best show-and-tell ever was ruined.

  That’s just the way I was as a kid—curious, rascally, assertive. I had a lot of questions, and I wouldn’t stop until I had the answers. I was always curious to find out what would happen if I did this or that. When I was three, one of the teachers at the day care sat me in a corner after I acted up. Unfortunately, she sat me right next to a light socket. This was back in the 1970s, long before socket guards. Naturally, I took off my red metal hair clip and stuck it in the socket. The electric jolt shot me ten feet backward. I looked down at my fingers, and they were black. The teacher got some ice, put it on my fingertips, and sat with me in a rocker until I calmed down.

  But at least I learned what happens when you stick your hair clip in a socket.

  Unfortunately, that’s how I learned most lessons in my life—through really painful experiences.

  THE OVERRIDING MEMORY I have of my early childhood, though, is of my parents’ marriage falling apart. My dad, who was only twenty when they got married, was crazy in love with my mom, and their wedding in a local church was a joyous event. His brothers decked out his car with tin cans and shaving cream, and his pastor came down from Illinois to perform the ceremony. But the simple truth is they got married way too young, and they didn’t realize they each had a lot of growing up to do. Before too long, the cracks started to show.

  After the Air Force my father became a DJ at a local club and, by his own admission, allowed himself to get sucked into a life of parties and drinking. He worked six nights a week, and he wasn’t around much, either for me or for my mom. And when he was around, my parents fought a lot.

  Sadly, I have only one memory of my mother and father together, and that is of them fighting in our living room, screaming and shoving each other. I can’t pull up a single other memory of them together during their marriage. My mother remembers that fight; my father says it never happened. That is pretty much the story of their breakup: two different sides, conflicting memories, and very little I could then—and even now—hold on to as the truth. They were both young, and they each made mistakes. And that, to me, is as good an explanation of what happened as there is.

  What I do know is when my parents split up, my life changed drastically. Their divorce when I was three years old marks a very clear turning point for me. It is the moment, I believe, when I became vulnerable.

  It is when the battle for my soul began.

  My mother remarried within a year. My stepfather, Hank, was a diesel mechanic who grew up in the backwoods of eastern Oklahoma. He was a lean, hard man with a gruff auburn beard and shaggy red hair. At first I found him friendly and fun. He liked to sling me over his shoulder and call me his sack of potatoes. Or he’d have us make what he called family sandwiches. The two pieces of bread were my mom and Hank, and I was the cold cut in between. They would surround me in a big hug, and I’d squeal and say, “I’m the bologna!” Hank also got me my first dog, a scruffy little brown mutt he named Critter. I adored Critter. But my sweetest memory of Hank is when he took me to a carnival and carried me through the fun house. It was pitch-black, and monsters kept jumping out and scaring us. My mom said she could hear me and my stepdad screaming our lungs out, so loudly a carnie had to open a side door to let us out.

  But then something terrible happened to Hank, and he became the monster.

  Fooling me into thinking I’d seen Satan was not the worst thing he did to me once he joined the family, not by a long shot. One night, when I was five, he and my mother had a horrible fight, worse than any fight she’d ever had with my dad. Hank was drugged up or drunk or both, and when he got angry enough, he grabbed his rifle and made his way to my bedroom.

  I was fast asleep in my sweet little room, with its yellow-checked curtains and matching bedspread, snuggled up with my best friend Snoozy, a giant teddy bear in red-and-white pajamas, slippers, and a nightcap that Hank had bought for me on my third birthday. I never heard the fighting or what happened next. With my mother running after him screaming for him to stop, Hank stood just inside my bedroom and aimed his gun at my bed.

  Then he pulled the trigger.

  The explosion stopped my mom in her tracks. Hank came out, the shotgun still smoking in his hands, and looked at her.

  “There,” he said, “I killed her.”

  THE BULLET MISSED MY HEAD BY ABOUT A FOOT. IT blew a big hole in the wall just above my headboard. Amazingly, I didn’t even wake up. I never figured out if Hank deliberately shot over my head just to terrorize my mom—the same way he’d scared me with the devil painting—or if he missed because he was too drunk to shoot straight. Either way, it was another close call.

  Hank wasn’t always a monster. I clearly remember loving him, because he was there for me after my parents’ difficult divorce. In the years after, I was desperate to see my father as much as I could—to still have him hold me and call me Sugar Bear. But that’s not how it worked out. I wound up seeing my dad only a handful of times a year. The divorce gave him visitation rights, but there were lots of times when a planned visit just didn’t happen. My mother remembers me getting dressed up and waiting on the porch for my dad to arrive, then shuffling back inside hours later, heartbroken. Then again, my father remembers showing up for scheduled visits and finding no one home. Conflicting memories, different versions, no way to know the truth.

  Then, when I was four, my mother got pregnant again. My first reaction when my mom told me was indignation—I was upset she and Hank made a baby without involving me. I didn’t know how babies were made—I figured it was like putting dough in an oven. All I knew is that it sounded fun, and I was mad they did it without me.

  Naturally, I demanded my mother explain why they’d left me out. She knew I wouldn’t stop bugging her until I had an answer, so she sat me down and explained the facts of life. Was I shocked! But the very next day I pulled all the other kids around me at day care and proudly described to them where babies come from. The teacher didn’t much appreciate my little biology lecture, so she cut it short and ratted me out to my mom.

  The truth is, I was just so excited by the idea of having a baby brother or sister. I remember my mom showing me her positive pregnancy test—I probably insisted on seeing it—and me being mesmerized by this strange little vial (this was way before test strips). I made her leave the vial on top of the television for weeks, because I thought it was the baby and I wanted to watch it grow.

  There was only one problem with getting
a sibling. Because there’d be a baby around the house, my dog, Critter, had to go. My mom and Hank kept telling me how great it would be to have a new baby and how Critter was going to a wonderful new home; reluctantly, I agreed to give her away.

  I waited on the front porch with Critter the day her new owners came to get her. They were a young couple, and they said they lived in a big house with a beautiful backyard that Critter would love. They said that I could come see her any time I wanted. Then the man took Critter by the leash, led her into their car, and shut the door. And just like that, my only true friend was gone. For months afterward I asked my mom to take me to see her, but for whatever reason she never did.

  I missed Critter badly, but even so, I couldn’t wait until the baby arrived. Then, one morning when I was at day care, a teacher came up to me in the playground and said I had a phone call. No kid ever got a phone call, so I knew something was up. I ran all the way to the office and picked up the phone.

  “Guess what, Crystal?” I heard my mom say. “You have a baby brother. You’re a big sister now!”

  The next day, Hank took me to the hospital to meet my new brother, Jayson. I remember being surprised by how tiny he was. Back at home my mom let me hold him, and I was instantly in love.

  I watched over Jayson like a lioness. He had wild red hair, and he was a willful little firecracker, sweet as pie one minute and ornery the next. One time, I was pushing him on a baby swing in our backyard when a huge black dog ambled over from next door. This dog was bigger than both of us combined, and I was terrified. I tried to lift Jayson out of the swing, but his legs kept getting stuck. I looked back at the dog, who was getting closer and closer. Finally I panicked and ran inside, leaving Jayson bobbing in the swing as the giant animal approached.

  “Mommy, Mommy, a big dog is going to eat Jayson!” I screamed. My mom ran outside, and I expected to see the baby swing empty and the big dog licking his lips. Instead the dog was gone, and Jayson was swinging and smiling away. I’m guessing he might have given that mutt a good kick in the chops. That was my brother for you—a tough little cookie.