Ghost No More (Ghost No More Series Book 1)

by CeeCee James

  Mama was back to her after-school list of things I had done wrong, and she shared them with the counselor. Sometimes it was a sock I had missed on the floor, or a pencil left on the table, but most often it was silverware I forgot to put away. Every time she shared the list, my stomach sank. I never understood how I kept screwing up because I had taken exceptional care to make sure that everything was put away.

  The counselor gave Mama some ideas for consequences, but Mama took them to a new level. That night she came into my room around one a.m. and flipped the light on. I squinted from the sudden light.

  Mama glared. “Get up. I found a dirty plate.”

  I crawled out of bed and staggered up the stairs to the kitchen, where all the dishes were lined up on the counter waiting to be washed again.

  It was like that every night. If she found a single cat poop in the cat box then I was out dumping the cat box in the dark, spraying it with the hose, and putting in fresh litter. I had many nights staring bleary eyed out into the dark night washing clean dishes, hoping to hurry back to bed.

  Mama still continued to lock her food up in her room and tightly controlled my portions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The counselor never knew about the food, but she thought I was disobedient because Mama told her that I tried to sneak food. The counselor convinced my parents to allow me five dollars of my babysitting money to spend on whatever food I wanted.

  Mama gave me ten minutes, and I ran through the store throwing cookies, chocolate, and popcorn in my basket. Food persisted in being weird, and now I was learning to binge, but at least I wasn’t hungry all the time. I weighed eighty-five pounds, but Mama was horrified at the junk food I was eating. She chanted to warn me, “Fatty, fatty, two by four, can’t fit through the bedroom door.”

  Part of the counselor’s tough-love therapy was an unlicensed, militant foster home that handled teenagers with behavior problems. The foster home was filled with kids who were addicted to drugs and out of control. The first time Mama sent me there she had a huge smile on her face, “Oh, you want to try foster care do you? I’ll give you foster care.”

  She drove through an ordinary suburban neighborhood and pulled up to a dumpy gray house. The woman who oversaw the home came to the front door and raised her hand in a silent greeting to Mama, while I pulled out my duffle bag from the back seat. The woman eyed me as I walked up the cracked driveway to the house.

  “I’m Mrs. Alice,” she said in a very businesslike attitude, “Come along inside, now.”

  She shut the door firmly behind me and pushed her thick glasses up her nose. I walked into the dark house, noticing that all the curtains were closed. Several faces investigated me from around the living room. Mrs. Alice pointed out her husband, and her two overweight, late teenaged kids. There were other faces that she didn’t introduce, and I assumed that they were foster kids like me.

  The first night that I was in foster care Mrs. Alice stated her rules, “There will be no talking for the first twenty four hours that you are in my home. It’s the rule that all the foster kids have to follow. Stay seated at that table until I give you permission to move.”

  I sat at the kitchen picnic table with my back to the rest of the family. The rest of the family and foster kids watched Police Academy and ate chips in the living room. I wasn’t given dinner and wasn’t allowed to leave my bench for the bathroom. It was easy for me to follow the rules. Life had already taught me that resisting only made things worse.

  After a few hours of sitting there my eyes started to sting. I thought I’d shut them for a second. My head bobbed. The oldest son came over and slapped the table next to me, and I jerked awake. I looked bleary-eyed at the strange run-down kitchen and for a minute didn’t know where I was. I wondered if I was having a nightmare.

  The second day was called the day of the impossible chores among us foster kids. Mrs. Alice assigned each one of us a chore, and if the chore was not done to her satisfaction, she gave another impossible chore. One of the girls had to clean the entire bathroom with a tooth brush. My job was to wash all the windows in the house, inside and out, with newspaper and vinegar. Because the chore had to be done to her high standards, I washed each window several times, and it took all day to finish. It was mindless work. I spent the time reminiscing about a book I’d just finished, called The Borrowers, as I pushed the wet newspaper in never ending circles. The vinegar dripped down my arms as I daydreamed about the conversation I would’ve had with Arrietty if I had discovered her tiny form peeping at me from behind curtain.

  I never knew when I would be sent to the foster home. Mama would wait until I rambled through the door after school and tell me to go pack my bags. She’d say she was tired of my chores not being done correctly. One time I was sent there because my parents wanted to visit my grandparents and didn’t have a place for me to stay.

  The next time that I stayed at the foster home, I was assigned the impossible chore of shoveling the snow off their back deck. Montana winters meant huge amounts of snow, and the snow had reached in frosty drifts to the top of their porch railings. Mrs. Alice wanted to see the bare boards, dried by the sunshine, when I had finished. That day, I imagined that I was at war and had to hurry and dig the trenches for the soldiers who were on their way. I imagined mortars going off and bullets whistling by my head, as I ducked down behind the porch stairs. Hours passed when I finally scraped the last of the slush off the porch. Mrs. Alice nodded her approval and then sent me to her neighbor’s house to do the same thing.

  I once mowed acres of their tall grass with a rusty lawn mower that continued to die. One of the other foster kids felt sorry for me, and ran over.

  “Let me see that stupid thing. What’s the matter with it?” He kicked it a few time and then bent down to see if it was filled with gas, while I admired his arm muscles. Somehow, he tinkered with it enough to get the mower working again. Mrs. Alice’s son watched the two of us from up in a fruit tree and pelted me with a couple of wormy apples. Mrs. Alice called her son to come inside, and he scrambled down with a moody expression on his face when he passed me. I shivered when he walked by, but he didn’t bother me again.

  The last time I stayed with Mrs. Alice, I had brought money with me because it was close to Mother’s Day. When Mrs. Alice climbed into her car to go to the store I ran out.

  “Do you think you could buy a lilac bush while you are out doing your errands? I want to surprise Mama.” I never forgot how long ago Mama had loved the purple lilac bush that grew beside the water pump outside our little brown house. She took my money with a nod.

  After she left, I walked over to an overgrown, thickly tangled flower bed that stretched twenty by twelve feet wide in front of their house. Mrs. Alice had told me to weed it before she drove away. I looked at it for a few minutes with my arms crossed, wondering how I was going to get the job done since I didn’t have tools or gloves. Giving a big sigh, I sat down in the middle of the weeds and twisted the stems around my fingers and yanked. Some of the plants had thorns, and my hands soon were scratched and stained green. Sweat dripped off the end of my nose, and I swore. Most of the weeds snapped off, leaving the roots behind.

  Mrs. Alice’s daughter came out with a candy bar, and watched me for a few minutes.

  “You know,” she said with her mouth full of chocolate, “if my mom sees those stubs sticking out of the ground she’s going to make you do something else. You better bite them out!”

  Standing up to stretch my aching back, I groaned at the hundreds of inch long green stubs that poked up out of the dry ground. I eased back down on my knees and scraped the dirt from the sides of one of the stubs with my fingers trying to dig it out, but the ground was too hard. I gave up, and used my teeth to pull out the remaining parts.

  Mrs. Alice pulled up several hours later, just as I was finishing up. She nodded at me, “I got your lilac bush.”

  I stood up, and dusted off my pants with a smile.

  “Come over here and help me haul the
se bags in,” she said, leaving the car door open.

  I grabbed the last two paper bags off the back seat and brought them into the house. She held a can of soda out to me and said, “Join me in the living room and rest for a minute. I think it’s about time we have a chat.”

  I followed her into the other room and sat on the worn out couch while she rocked in the rocking chair. “You’ve been coming here for a while now. I’d like to know a little bit more about you,” she said.

  It was the first time we had talked together in all the times that I had stayed at her place. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say.

  Mrs. Alice started the conversation, “Some of my foster kids struggle with drugs. Do you use drugs?”

  I shook my head no, and mumbled, “Mama and I have a hard time getting along.”

  She stared at me for a moment through her thick glasses and rocked. The silence made me feel claustrophobic, so I talked for a little bit about school. She didn’t say anything, just let me babble away. I didn’t share much about my home life, but let a few details slip about Grandpa’s sexual abuse. I surprised myself when I heard the words tumbling out of my mouth, but the words brought relief, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. When the words petered out, Mrs. Alice had silvery tracks on her cheeks. She beckoned me to sit in her lap while she hugged and rocked me.

  I never returned to Mrs. Alice’s house again, or to my counselor either. I never learned why.

  A week after I returned from foster care, Mama said, “You can invite a few of your close friends here for your fourteenth birthday.” I didn’t know what to think, but nodded, and told her thank you.

  I was excited and nervous for my friends to come over. We chattered nonstop on the school bus after school and trooped up the street.

  I felt feverish when we walked into the living room. It was strange being upstairs in my parent’s half of the house with my friends. Mama stayed out of sight while I opened my presents. Then, with a strange smile she brought out the cake and set it before me while everyone sang. She waited until I had the knife in the cake, cutting the first row, before saying, “CeeCee has been irresponsible and selfish to all of you. She didn’t pick up the dog poop for her guests. She’ll have to do it now.”

  I pulled the knife out of the little blue flower I had been cutting and set it on a plate. My friends chatter trailed off, and they looked at me with uneasy frowns, unsure of what to do. I got up and headed outside, and my friends trailed behind me as I trudged from pile to pile with my shovel.

  Soon after my birthday, Mama hit me with the belt for the last time. She raised her arm and thrashed me with all of her strength again and again. I was determined to hold back the screams and ground my teeth together from the effort. I would not give in, not ever. Her arm grew tired from beating me and still she couldn’t get me to scream. Her face turned red from anger. She marched back upstairs, slamming the basement door closed.

  I stood up from my cramped position, with bright red whip marks all over my body, and looked at myself in the mirror. I said to my reflection, “You are strong. You are a survivor. You can survive this.”

  Chapter 18

  ~Three Houses and a Pond~

  My grandparents moved to Idaho, and soon after Mama said she was ready for another fresh start. We packed everything up again and the dark house was put on the market. The house was filled with chaos as Mama and Adam took several trips to scavenge empty boxes from the grocery stores. We spent the next few weeks bumping into towers of boxes, packing, and then unpacking them to find the stuff we needed.

  The house sold almost immediately. Mama found a storage unit to hold most of our belongings and furniture. Adam sent out his resume, and we waited on pins and needles each week for news that he had found a job.

  In the meantime, I settled into the new rental home. My bedroom was in another converted porch, lined with white house siding on the interior wall. It had two huge windows in the corner that filled my room with daylight for the first time in five years. I loved it. I didn’t care about the small room size, or the bugs, or the paint that peeled off the walls and showered on the carpet in white flecks. Every morning, sunshine splashed across my face and made me smile before I was fully awake. This summer felt magical. It was a gift, and it resonated within every inch of me that it was going to be special.

  For my fifteenth birthday, my parents gave me a used red manual typewriter. I sat on the floor in the sunshine and typed every day. The keys made a lovely clicking sound, and the bell rang at the end of the margin when it was time to return the carriage, as I filled page after page with my stories and poetry. I entered one of my poems into the local newspaper poetry contest, and it won first place. I saved the newspaper in the same box where I kept the cards Grandma and Dad had sent me through the years.

  Every day I still had to stay outside, but now there was a new world to explore. The woods stretched for acres behind my house and spilled out into to a wild strawberry field. The strawberries that grew there were no bigger than my pinky fingernail. I chuckled whenever I found a cluster of them hidden under green leaves. It was quiet in the field, away from all signs of humanity. I’d stretch out on the grassy bed and stare at the cloud animals in the sky. My imagination had free reign, and I drank in its innocence. Spending time in my sweet, secret place slowly recharged my joy for life.

  When I wasn’t in the strawberry field, I was out exploring the mountain roads that wound around our new house. I walked for hours and hours on the dirt roads and daydreamed that Jesus was walking along beside me. In my daydream, I’d look up at him and say, “I have no idea where I am, or where I am going, but isn’t this cool?” And I sensed that he kept me safe and led me home after each adventure.

  One time, when I returned home from my secret place, Mama was on the couch with a pile of used tissues all about her. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying. She looked at me when I walked in.

  “The cat’s gone,” she said, before making a low moan. She jumped up to hide in her room.

  Three days later, her cat was still missing when I left for my babysitting job. My heart was heavy because Mama was still hiding out in her room. In the back of my mind I always worried about her health. I put the children to bed and threw myself on the sofa. The worry was driving me crazy. We have to find the cat. Mama has to be ok.

  I couldn’t let myself think about what would happen to Mama if we didn’t find the cat. Three days! Where the heck could he be? I slid off the couch and onto my knees in their living room, crying in silence.

  “Please God! Please let us find him!”

  Real pain started to wash over me as the fear told me Mama was not going to be ok. I started begging God for help, my face scrunched into the couch cushion to muffle my words.

  Same as last time, that strange peace came over me again, comforting with its heavy warmth. I couldn’t believe it, and didn’t want to move in case it went away. I sat there with my eyes closed and soaked in the wonderful reassurance.

  The phone rang a few minutes later. It was Mama, shouting through the receiver in amazement, “We found the cat! He was locked in the closet in our bedroom.”

  I hung up the phone with a smile. The closet in their room had never been opened because Mama wasn’t given the key by the owner when they signed the lease. She had described how she had been lying on her bed when she heard the cat meow. Adam broke down the door to discover the cat curled up inside an old dusty box.

  With the cat back, Mama was out of her room once again, but she was acting very strange, like she had a secret.

  One morning, a few weeks later, she came out to the kitchen to tell me she wouldn’t be there when I came home from school.

  “I’m leaving this afternoon to visit someone. I’ll be gone for a while.”

  My eyebrows shot up. Why is she being so mysterious? I was still looking at her when she spun around and left the room.

  She was gone for several weeks. I breathed in the freedom like it wa
s pure, fresh air.

  The first day, I ran the washing machine non-stop cleaning my clothes. I piled all the clean clothes on my bed and jumped into them, wrapping myself in their sweet warmth. Giggles burst out of me. I felt rich to have them all clean at once.

  My sheets need to be washed! Jumping up, I tore the sheets and blankets off my bed, and stuffed them cycle by cycle through the washing machine. The blanket Mama had given me, where every stitch was a false ‘I love you’, melted in the dryer. The nylon fibers stuck together in a gluey mess. I tried to pull the fibers apart, but the yarn stretched and snapped, so I stuffed the mess under my bed.

  That night, my stepdad came whistling through the door with a box of ice cream sandwiches in his hand. He handed me one, and we watched TV. It was the first time that I had ice cream sandwiches. I’d never enjoyed a dessert more.

  While she was gone, the food cupboard stayed unlocked, and I never got into trouble. My body felt like every part was stretching like after a night of good sleep. It was a glorious summer.

  When Mama returned from her vacation, she was still very preoccupied. I caught her mumbling to herself as she wiped the clean counter over and over in never-ending circles.

  “No, no. It can’t happen. It can’t be. Not sure…. When is…. They don’t understand.”

  The house was tense again.

  I walked inside one late afternoon, just as Mama hung up the phone. Her hand rested against the receiver for a second, and then she turned and leaned against the counter. She pressed her lips tightly together and stared with blank eyes at her hands. Something was wrong.

  I eased up next to her, “Mama, are you ok? What’s the matter?”

  Clenching the side of the countertop, she whispered, “That was the doctor. The test I took last week turned up positive. They’re afraid I have…” her voice cracked. With a few heaving breaths, she said in a voice high like a little girls, “It looks bad.” Her shoulders shook with the silent sobs, so I gave her a few awkward pats on her back.