Regina Noctis

Last Tuesday when I got home from class, there was a subpoena. The case against my cousin for the stolen and forged checks was going to trial. This surprised me, because he has always pled out in the past for a reduced sentence. Trial would be on that Thursday.

Late Wednesday we got word that he pled to one count, and the others were dropped in the plea bargain.

He was sentenced to two years in prison, of which my uncle (a former CO) figures he will serve a year.

This is simultaneously good news and bad. We’ve never had a year’s vacation from John, it’s always been significantly less. That’s good. At the same time, one year is rather disappointing after originally being told he’d get five. It’s that much sooner that we’ll wind up returning to the daily insanity, stress, and fear that has characterized these several years. I was saying before he was sentenced that if he’d even be gone for a year, it’d be a good vacation from it all. Now that it is indeed what he’s getting, it doesn’t seem like a year is long enough. It feels far too quickly that we will again be in that situation.

I’m trying to force myself to look at the good – a year with no John – and not how it feels like he’ll be right back here in next to no time. I have brief moments of success at this, but mostly I swing between worrying about when he gets out and anger that he will serve a year on so many counts of forgery and burglary.

The scene: Bedroom, late at night. Mother asleep, daughter on computer. Orange Manx cat getting scratched behind the ears while daughter reads her LJ friends list.

After a few moments, the cat moves away and gathers himself to leap onto the bed. The daughter knows that his preferred spot to sleep is on the far side of the bed. This usually means that if he hops onto the bed from here, he’ll go mountaineering over mother to get there. This will wake the mother up. The daughter has seen this happen a couple times as the Manx goes scurrying over mother’s hip. In an attempt to stop the cat, the daughter turns her chair, but she’s too slow.

The cat leaps onto the bed, and starts his run across the sleeping mother. Usually, he goes over her hip because she’s asleep on her side. This time, mother is asleep on her back, which means the Manx starts to head across her stomach. He is expecting it to be like going over the mother’s hip, but easier.

Then he discovers that stomachs don’t feel like hips. The cat reacts with shock, leaping three feet straight up into the air. He realizes he’s going to come down on this weird-feeling thing that has shocked him, and tries desperately to hover. He comes down on the mother’s stomach anyway, then leaps up and backward to get away. At the top, his arc takes him three feet into the air again, he has pushed off so violently. He hits the wall next to the daughter’s computer desk, drops to the floor, and runs to the end of the bed, where he stares up at the bed. Every line of the Manx cat’s body language says, “WHAT the HELL was THAT??”

The mother is similarly confused by having been used as a feline’s trampoline.

The daughter, who witnessed the whole thing, almost manages to fall out of her chair from laughing.

And is still giggling maniacally as she writes about it in her LJ a day and a half later, aided by a userpic that has the exact body language of the Manx as he attempted to evolve wings in mid-leap.

The psycho called again today, and told the grandmother unit that it’s sounding like he will probably get five years in prison.

In the past, he never went to prison. He went to our local medium-security jail, a different beast than prison. It’s a place so overcrowded that the people there generally serve only about a third of their sentences.

This time, he’ll be going to prison. Even if he doesn’t get five years but something a little less than that, it will still be the longest sentence he’s been given. And he will serve a good chunk of that sentence. Mom’s estimating that if he does get five years, he’ll probably serve at least three of them.

A three year vacation from all the stress, fear, and insanity. It’s so outside our past experience when dealing with John and his bouncing in and out of jail that it doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true.

Somebody pinch me so I know I’m not just having a really good dream.

Thursday morning, the psychotic cousin came over. He ranted a bit at my grandmother, and then went outside to “do some yardwork.” This usually means that he’s going outside to destroy some of the landscaping. We didn’t hear from him for the rest of that day.

Friday afternoon, we began to wonder if he’d been arrested for something, since he didn’t show up to make us miserable for another day. He’d gotten in trouble in the next county over, and had a court date in Porterville for Friday. We figured that he’d show up to try and convince us to let him take the van to get there, since it’s not a walkable distance and there is no bus line that goes from here to there. He never appeared, though, so the anticipated argument never happened.

As I was getting ready to go run household errands, he finally called. He’d been arrested Thursday morning, taken right out of our yard. None of us saw it happen, and had no clue it had.

The psycho had stolen a checkbook going to the joint account held by my mother and grandmother. My grandmother, of course, wouldn’t have pressed charges if it’d been in her name only, just as she refused to press charges on the couple thousand dollars the psycho charged up on a credit card he stole from her. But my mother took that out of her hands. Since my mom was on the account, she filed the paperwork to press charges on the stolen and forged checks. In about two weeks’ time, my cousin had forged checks and cashed them to the tune of something over $1,000.

When my mother took in the forms – one for every check he’d forged, plus attached original and/or copies of the forged checks, the financial crimes officer she talked to said that they were particularly busy currently, and it would likely be a couple weeks before they could even start investigating, and then would probably be a couple weeks of investigation before they could move against the psycho cousin.

However, the police started investigating that very week, the documentation my mother had was so thorough, and the case so cut-and-dried that John was arrested exactly one week after my mother turned everything in.

Mom looked up the case on the county court’s online system. He is currently being held pending his arraignment date of 9/11.

Previous to this, his bail has always been pretty low, a couple thousand dollars here and there. He finally hit something more approaching the big time, however. Bail set by the PD pending the arraignment is $140,000.

He will be arraigned, and eventually tried, on 7 felony counts of forgery and 7 felony counts of burglary in the second degree.

He’ll probably plead down on some of this. He has always pled guilty on the things he’s gotten arrested for in order to get a shorter sentence. But I don’t think he’ll be able to make all of the felony charges go away. He didn’t manage to plead down his previous felony, for stealing his mother’s car.

I suppose it’s possible that this time he’ll attempt to plead not guilty. Based on the call yesterday, he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. As a matter of fact, he thinks that it’s all my grandmother’s fault that he’s in jail, and told her so repeatedly. Surprisingly, my grandmother kept telling him that he brought it on himself and he has to pay the consequences of the things he’s done, instead of taking the blame and crying about how it breaks her heart that this happened to him. Instead, it was him that was breaking her heart, not the circumstances. I could see that this was the thought behind what she was saying. The difference from her usual reactions is small, but significant. I doubt she’ll be able to hold onto that as time goes by, because I’ve seen this kind of thing a couple times before. At least for now, though, she is managing to be a little less irrational about the psycho and what he’s done.

She still won’t press charges on the credit card thing, but this is still an improvement over the normal course of events.

I went to the store after the call ended, singing, “Ding dong! The witch is dead!” the whole way. I was bursting to tell someone, so I called while I was at the grocery store, and left him a voice mail giving him the big fact – that John had been arrested on multiple felony charges – and told him I’d call later to let him know the whole scoop. I practically danced down the aisles as I picked up food for the household.

I’d been feeling sick for a week at that point. The same set of symptoms that eventually led to the bit of a high-stress-related breakdown I had at the end of the spring semester. From the moment that phone call came, they disappeared.

It’s time to celebrate.

You. Yes, you. Stop what you’re doing, and raise a glass of your favorite drink right now. It’s time to celebrate!