by Cathy Lamb
My mother swallowed, her swaying stopped for a millisecond, then she started up again. Smile in place. “I’ve been very busy, Doctor.”
He nodded. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“Single working mothers don’t get very many breaks, as you know.”
“Yes, I do realize that, Candy. But as I understand it, Trayce has been living with you, is that correct? Did you know that on your daughter’s body we found many signs of past injuries? Can you tell us where those injuries came from?”
The smile faltered a bit. “Julia has always been a clumsy child, falling down all the time—”
“Ah, well, then,” said the doctor. “That would explain why she broke three ribs some time ago. When children fall down they often break their ribs.” Even I caught the sarcasm.
My mother flushed slightly. “I didn’t say nothin’ about her breaking ribs when she fell. I didn’t know she’d done broke her ribs!”
“You didn’t know?” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Did she ever complain about her side hurting her?”
The flush became darker. I was so exhausted now, my head aching so bad, one of my eyes drooped shut.
“That child is always bitchin’ about everything, all the time. Something’s always wrong.”
“Your daughter may well have been complaining about her stomach hurting, because there’s bruising there, too, not to mention the bruises up and down her arms, a few scars from recent burns, two of which look like cigarette burns, and several scars that appear to be from a whip or a belt. Which one was it?”
It had been a belt, I wanted to answer, but my mouth didn’t seem to want to work. I knew my mother knew that it was a belt, too, because her eyes lit up a bit with her answer, but then she snapped those red lips of hers tight shut.
“There wasn’t no belt, no whip, Doctor.”
“Can you explain the injuries?”
“No, I can’t, and I don’t have to. The kids at school probably hit her. She annoys me—she probably annoys the hell out of them, too.”
I wanted to raise my hand and argue that point, but that head of mine felt like it was going to explode. I noticed Nora coming over to my side. She put her hand on my forehead, looked at the IV, added something to it. I really liked Nora.
“Candy, how long has Trayce been living in your home?” The doctor said it like Trayce was a little black leech that had attached himself to our walls with his gooey, sticky body.
“For about a year, off and on.”
“Off and on?”
“Yes, Trayce comes and goes as he pleases, but now it looks like he’s gone for good since the police is after him.” She shot me a look. Yes, Momma was very pissed off, no doubt about it.
“I am making a note of your daughter’s injuries and the fact that Trayce gave them to her. I hope the police catch up with him, because although you don’t seem to agree, any man who does this to a child deserves to be in jail.”
“In jail?” My mother sounded shocked. “For God’s sake! Trayce just lost his cool with a kid who’s got a smart-ass mouth and a bad attitude. He didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”
Now the doctor and Nora, the nurse, looked like they were going to lose it. So did the other two men standing by the doctor.
“People lose their cool all the time,” Dr. Horner said, “but that doesn’t give them the right to pick a child up and fling her face-first against the wall, giving her a concussion. Your boyfriend could have killed your daughter. You don’t seem to understand that.”
The doctor was staring at my mother as if he couldn’t understand her, talking to her as if she were an idiot. She had had me when she was seventeen, and I had always thought she was so pretty. I still thought she was pretty. I thought all men thought she was pretty. It was clear as day that no one in this room thought my mother was pretty.
“I understand it plenty damn fine!” my mother shouted, crossing her arms. “Why don’t you mind your own business? Trayce is outta my house—that’s all you need to know.”
“No, that’s not true. What I need to know is that you’re not going to let this happen to your daughter again. You’re her mother. It is your job to protect your child, and you failed miserably. Many women tolerate getting beat up from time to time from the men in their lives, but most draw the line when their men send their children flying across the room like paper dolls.”
Sensing probably that there was zero chance she was going to get a date with the doctor, Candy let her fuse burn out. “Oh, shut the fuck up, you know-it-all shit. What the hell do you know? You’re blaming me for my daughter’s injuries, and it ain’t my fault at all.”
“It’s not? You are living with a man who has abused your daughter, it looks to me, on several, if not many, occasions.”
“Look, you hyper-educated busybody, I’m Julia’s mother, and I take good care of her, and I don’t have to listen to any of this shit anymore.”
She pushed through the doctors without saying good-bye to me. I felt a tear slip out of the closed eye, then another tear slip out of the other eye.
“We’ve reported you to Children’s Services,” the doctor called after her.
Before she left, my mother turned around to laugh and say, “What the hell do I care? What are they going to do? Trayce is gone—there ain’t no threat there anymore. I never hit her.”
That wasn’t exactly true, I thought. I did get hit upon occasion. And beat. And slapped. It was her words, however, that always lacerated my heart to pieces.
After my mother left, Nora and the doctors and the other nurses comforted me, brought me ice cream. Nora held me as I cried, then slept. When I woke up, another nurse, named Marci, was there to take care of me, and to hold me while I cried again. On the next shift I met Gabrielle, who did the same. Then I was back to Nora.
My mother came to get me a few days later, and I cried when I left the hospital.
The next year I was back in the hospital again, but we were in a new state by then, and the doctors and nurses were different. I went in once when I hurt my leg. I had been running from home, away from Trayce, who had found his way back to our home. I ran right into the street and was hit by a car. I got bashed up some, but the only lasting scar was from a gash on my thigh.
The other driver was appalled and sorry and cried all over me. My mother, however, thought it would be wonderful if she took that man’s insurance company for everything she could, so she got herself a lawyer, and she sued. I still went down the street to another church for my clothes and my coat, and I still had free lunch and breakfast at school.
Another time I was in the hospital when I was critically sick with pneumonia. My mother ignored how sick I was, ignored the school’s calls, ignored the pleas of the women at church who begged her to take me to the doctor. Finally, two of the women from church came by our gross apartment when I didn’t arrive at church on Sunday morning, picked me up, and drove me to the hospital.
I was there for seven days. My mother came to pick me up.
So now, every time I went into a hospital I felt ill because of my memories. Not of the doctors and nurses, who had almost always been kind. Not of the treatments, the tests, and the needles. Not even of the pain of injury. No, I had learned to hate hospitals because of the memories that made me face up to the fact that my mother really didn’t give a damn about me.
But when I got the call from the state police, I flew to the hospital, located in Monroe, the same town where I worked at the library.
And that’s when I learned a hell of a lot about methamphetamine.
Methamphetamine use takes a hold of a person and shakes the goodness and generosity and sanity right out of them, and turns them into a dangerous, pathetic, moral-less, desperate, criminal, altering their brains so there is little chance of going back to the cool person they used to be.
It was a meth addict, a friend of their mothers’, who put both Shawn and Carrie Lynn in the hospital the night before.
As Aunt Lydia, Stash, Caroli
ne, Lara, and I stared down at the sleeping children, sobs shaking our bodies as we looked at their bruised faces, IVs, and tubes going in and out of their bodies, I blamed myself.
I should have taken Shawn and Carrie Lynn away from their mother, away from her boyfriends. I should have insisted the police come, again to their apartment. I should have insisted that Children’s Services come again, and when they didn’t, I should have written letters to everyone from the governor on down. I should have forced their mother, by blackmail if need be, to let the children come and live with me.
I felt totally, completely responsible. I had failed them. Failed them utterly and completely. I had allowed this to happen. But I knew one thing for sure as I cried my eyes out over those two kids: come hell or high water or a move to Australia, I would not allow Shawn and Carrie Lynn to live a life like mine for one more minute.
Aunt Lydia and Stash and Caroline and Lara must have been thinking the same thing. “We’re taking them home with us,” Aunt Lydia said, her voice cracking like dead twigs. “We’re taking them home.”
Shawn and Carrie Lynn were in the hospital for a week. I took off the week from the library. I was joined at the kids’ bedside by Aunt Lydia, Stash, Dave, Scrambler, Caroline, Katie, Lara, and Lara’s husband, Jerry. Dean came, too. I held him as we both cried.
The local and state newspaper carried the story, and the kids were inundated with presents. Every time I think of it, I cry. Goodness in the face of horrible evil, that type of thing.
New clothes came for the children. New books. New toys. New games. New coats. The response from the parents at the library was overwhelming. New sheets and comforters with matching lights and teddy bears from the mothers at the library who had taken up a collection.
“So the kids can have something new, something to start over with,” one of the mother’s said, her eyes swollen from a thousand tears. The newspaper had reported that the children had lain in their own blood, in their own beds over the weekend, their mother never noticing how hurt they were, as she was strung up on meth.
A fund for their college educations was set up. I expected to see a total of $2,000 in the accounts. These were not good financial times for people, after all, and the kids really didn’t know that many people. But by the end of the second week, $121,000 had come in for Shawn and Carrie Lynn, to be kept in trust for their college education. There was a rumor of two anonymous enormous donations, but there were also hundreds of smaller donations from the townspeople.
I could not have kept Ms. Cutter away from that hospital with an army. She was there every single day, twice a day. She brought books, all nonfiction or classics, of course, which she read aloud to the children. One time they were both sleeping when I walked in on her reading Shakespeare. “Children can learn while they sleep, I’m sure of it,” she said, her voice pinched and pain-filled.
When the children got a little better, she taught them how to crochet. She brought little painting projects. She brought crafts.
And every time she left, Olivia Cutter would press their little hands together in hers. She tried to hide the tears in her eyes the first day that Shawn and Carrie Lynn were in the hospital, but that only lasted until she left their room, and then she collapsed in a heap on the hallway floor, her body shaking with sobs. She had to be medicated at the hospital and held overnight, because her heart was beating so fast they thought she was zooming her way into a heart attack. She took the rest of the week off from the library due to her health problems, but she still visited the kids every day, twice a day.
By the sixth day she was able to get halfway down the hall without sobbing and gasping for breath. Me, Stash, Dave, Aunt Lydia, Roxy Bell from the library, or one of the doctors or nurses always made it a point to catch her before she sagged to the floor, and when she was stable again, she and I would go to the chapel and pray together, kneeling before a statue of Mary, crying our eyes out.
Dean Garrett came from Portland and read to the kids, bringing little puzzles and games with him. He would read to Shawn, and I would read to Carrie Lynn; then we would switch places. The children always fell asleep in our arms.
By the end of the week, almost stumbling from exhaustion, I decided to go home and sleep, knowing how well the nurses cared for them during the night. I had met all of the nursing staff, and knew I was looking at Nora and Marci and Gabrielle, the nurses who had treated me as a child, reincarnated.
“I’ll take you to dinner,” Dean said.
“I think I’m too tired to eat.”
“You’re eating, honey,” he insisted, wrapping an arm around me as we walked into the cool night from the hospital. “You’re going to make yourself sick if you don’t eat. You’re not taking care of yourself. You’re losing weight, Julia.”
I laughed. “Well, that’s a good thing.” The watermelons on my chest still looked huge, I knew, but my pants were actually a little looser. Hip hip hooray, I thought dully. That’s what staring at two innocent children who have been beat to within an inch of their lives will do to you.
“No,” Dean said quietly. “It’s not a good thing. I like you the way you are.” He stared down at me in the parking lot, the stars bright and shiny above us.
“You like me fat?” I was tired, tired all the way into my bones and ligaments, but I still managed to smile. I couldn’t help it. Anytime I was with Dean Garrett I felt like smiling. And if I wasn’t smiling on the outside because he still made me nervous, so very nervous, inside my heart was always smiling, I could feel it.
“I like you the way you are, Julia Bennett, just the way you are.”
“And how’s that?”
“Beautiful.”
I laughed. “You’re good for a woman, Dean Garrett. I have barely slept in a week. I have no makeup on, so I look a little like death. I hardly had time to brush my hair, and I just noticed I’m wearing the same shirt I’ve worn for three days. My teeth feel like moss is growing on them, and I’m sure if I lifted my arms, the odor could knock a small bull to his butt.”
Dean Garrett stared down at me, the corners of his mouth lifting up. “I happen to like bulls, Julia, and moss. So don’t worry. To me, brushed hair or not, wearing the same shirt every day for a month, I don’t care. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever met in my life.”
“I don’t feel beautiful.” I leaned against his truck and crossed my arms over my chest. He placed both of his arms on either side of me.
“Why? Why do you not feel beautiful, Julia?”
I gritted my teeth, the guilty hysteria bubbling in me. “I failed them.” The words came out in a gasp. “I failed Shawn and Carrie Lynn.”
“Oh, honey.” Dean sighed and pulled me close.
“I should have done more….” The sobs shook my body, again and again, and Dean just held me in that dark parking lot, rubbing my back, hugging me close.
“You didn’t fail anyone.”
“I did. I failed Shawn and Carrie Lynn. I called Children’s Services, and I called the police, but they wouldn’t do anything.” I cried into his shoulder again. “I knew what their lives were like at home, I know that sense of fear and loss and loneliness, because I lived through it myself as a child.” I choked. I wondered how I would ever live with myself again.
He cupped my face in his hands. “We have something in common, Julia. My childhood was like yours.”
“It was?” I pulled away. It was?
“My childhood was lousy, Julia, and I left home at fifteen. Suffice it to say that my mother died when I was two, and my father spent the next thirteen years making sure I was miserable. He had a belt that whipped across my back more times than I can tell you, and I have the scars to prove it. You would know if you had ever tried to take my shirt off.”
I bit my lower lip, and he kissed me.
“He would often put me in a closet when I was a kid, Julia, for hours, sometimes overnight. I am the most claustrophobic person you have ever met because of it.”
The th
ought of a young, motherless Dean in a dark closet by himself made tears come into my eyes.
“We lived in Idaho, and I worked every single hour from the time I got home from school until about eleven at night on our farm. In the summers, I worked sixteen-hour days. Nothing I did was good enough. He threw a bottle at my head once, which is how I got the scar on my forehead. My earliest memory is how he kicked my cat across the room. The cat pulled itself into a ball and died right in my arms. He did the same thing with a puppy I received from a neighbor.”
Dean shut his mouth with a snap. I began to cry again, held him tight. I ached for him. Ached for me. Ached for Shawn and Carrie Lynn. Why are so many people so brutal to children, I wondered. Why? I felt an instant, intense connection with Dean, that sad understanding that comes through shared terror and misery.
“I know your ex-fiancé beat up on you,” he said gruffly. “I know that you survived both your childhood and him, that you didn’t let anyone crush you.
“And you still care, really care about people. I see it in your eyes when you talk about Katie or Lara or Shawn and Carrie Lynn. Lydia and Stash adore you. Katie told me you’re her very best friend. Lara told me she never had confidence in her art until she showed it to you. Shawn and Carrie Lynn love you. The chocolate you have given to townspeople who are sick and older is the stuff of legends.”
He smiled at me, kissed me on the lips until the passion was welling so hot and heavy in me I thought it might just bowl me right over. It was a passion for Dean, mixed in with a crush of overwhelming and conflicting emotions.
“I love you, Julia. I know it’s more than you want to hear right now, more than you’re ready to handle, but I still wanted to tell you where I stand.”
I nodded at him. I liked knowing where he stood.
19
It is amazing what an intimidating lawyer who knows everyone can do for you.
Dean Garrett was both intimidating and knew everyone. I hadn’t known this fact until we started fighting for custody for Shawn and Carrie Lynn.