by Lauren Jayne
I just looked at them with terror in my eyes and nodded. By that time Mom and Dad had heard the commotion and were in the kitchen. Thankfully, Mom was dressed, as she usually walked around the house in her underwear and one of Dad’s undershirts.
Without a word, the men came into the kitchen, read Dad his rights, and put handcuffs on him. Without a word, Dad looked up at Mom, and they escorted him down our front steps and into the waiting black car that was parked in our cul-de-sac. Following them outside, I checked to make sure none of our neighbors were watching; no one was in sight. Walking back up to the house, I found Mom standing in the kitchen.
I looked at her and asked, “What’s going on? Who were they? Where are they taking Dad? What’s happening?”
Mom looked right through me and said in a monotone voice, “Go to school.”
Walking home from school that day, the autumn breeze kicked up, and I realized that I’d left the house in such a rush that morning I’d forgotten a coat. As I walked toward our dark, tree-covered house, up the juniper-shrouded walk to the front door, I felt in my pockets and realized I didn’t have my key. I couldn’t believe how stupid I was. It was zipped into my coat pocket, which was neatly lying across the foot of my bed. Walking through the soggy grass to the back door, I saw Fred. He was staring up at me from the kitchen, and I was staring down at him from the deck looking in through the sliding glass door.
“Please, God, let it be open,” I thought. But I knew it wasn’t. Part of my nightly ritual was going through the house and checking every door, making sure the locks were in the right position on each window. I had that house battened down like Fort Knox and I knew it. Waiting on the deck to see if Noah would show up, I sat and went through my school folder.
After an hour, I really had to go pee. Embarrassed that my neighbors might see me going, I crept under the deck and watched as my pee rolled down the muddy hill like rain down a leaf.
Lying on the back deck looking up at the gray sky, I could hear Fred scratching on the window. Dad hated that, so I instinctively scolded him, tapping on the sliding glass door. Fred just looked at me and turned his head this way and that. His ears perked up and his eyebrows raised; he was like a person. As the sun started to set, I began to get cold and a little scared. Knowing it could be midnight before Mom got home from one of her meetings and that Noah was going to be at Dustin’s or Danny’s or Tim’s until whenever, I had to come up with Plan B. Walking down the steps off the deck onto the grass, I could hear Fred whimpering. “It’s OK,” I yelled back.
As I turned the corner, I found it–my way into the house. It was a small rectangular window at the corner of our formal living room. Peeking through the glass, I assessed it; it was only a few feet from the ground. I sat down on the cold, wet grass and put my foot up to the window. Fred heard me and was now at the window.
“OK, Fred, go on!” I pretended to throw something, and he looked away.
It was dark outside now and my nervousness around breaking the window was overshadowed by my fear of being alone outside. With the heel of my shoe I kicked out the window; using my elbow, I pushed out the broken glass and carefully crawled in. Fred was jumping on me like crazy; I had never been happier to be in my house.
Once in the room, I stared at the two velvet, paisley-covered couches with the glass coffee table between, topped by a bowl of nuts and a nutcracker, and I thought, “Has anyone ever sat in this room? Has anyone ever even eaten one of those weird looking nuts?”
After inhaling a bowl of Raisin Bran cereal, I went down to make a fire. When the front door opened, I was relieved to see Noah from downstairs where I was watching Laverne & Shirley with Fred.
“Noah, I had to break the window to get in. What am I going to do?”
“What, what window? Why?”
“I forgot my key.”
I walked him into the cold living room and all he said was, “You are so busted.”
I made us some lasagna Hamburger Helper for dinner with the meat I’d taken out last night and at about ten-thirty Noah went up to his room, and I started my nightly ritual. I’d watched Mom do a twelve-step program to wash her face. I wanted to do the same, but I didn’t have quite as many options. After I washed my face with soap, brushed my hair, and brushed and flossed my teeth, I got into bed. When I opened my bedroom door, a whoosh of cold air grabbed me. We had to keep all of the upstairs doors closed or we’d never be able to heat the bottom floor of the house with the fire. I climbed into my twin bed and realized I hadn’t done my security check. Noah was in his room with his door closed and I was walking around the house like I always did before bed with the fire poker in my hand and Fred as my shadow.
Finishing my safety checklist, I crawled into my cold sheets. Fred jumped up and pushed his small, black body as close to mine as he could, backing up into me every time I moved a millimeter. Lying there, I thanked God for helping me to get into the house and then for our freezer full of food, and for bringing Noah home safe. I did this every night when I couldn’t fall asleep. Fred sat up and started looking at the window; a neighbor dog was barking. Lying in my bed, our house silent, my heart was beating so loudly I could feel it pulsing in my ears. I jumped when my eyelashes brushed against my pillowcase; then I realized it was just me. I tried to calm myself down. Hearing Noah’s voice in my head, “What’s there to be afraid of? Has anyone ever been murdered here? No. Just turn off your light and go to sleep; you’re being weird.” I kept breathing and telling myself it was stupid to be afraid while I laid in bed paralyzed with fear.
Finally, at around eleven thirty, I heard the garage door open under my room; Mom was home. This was usually my signal that I could fall asleep, but tonight I had questions, and I wanted her to know that I was up so she could tell me what was going on with Dad.
As Mom walked up the stairs, she passed my bedroom.
“Mom,” I called.
She jumped; I’d startled her. “You scared me. What?”
“Well, umm…”
“I am so tired I could fall over. What?”
“I broke a window today.”
“What!”
“Well, I forgot my key and…”
“You can’t forget your key, period. I can’t do it. I just can’t. And get it fixed before we all freeze.”
Mom walked down the hall into her room and closed her door.
Chapter 7
Shhh, I’m on the Phone
After a few months, and without any notice, Dad was out on bail and Mom was in her element. She rose to the top of Fortunate, her rapidly-growing multi-level marketing company, gracing the cover of their magazine, and speaking at meetings for audiences of two hundred at the Red Lion hotel in Sea-Tac.
Mom was a rockstar in this world, getting the praise she’d always longed for. If you’d just listen to Mom, she’d take you to the top with her. Her latest protégé, Eunice, did just that. Mom was known as the multi-level marketing guru and people all but kissed her feet. They listened to her like Moses and the burning bush, scribbling every word that came from her mouth. If you listened to Mom, you were assured a ticket to the Holy Land.
Dad looked at Mom with total admiration, knowing she had saved our family from crumbling while he was doing time. He’d throw on a suit and be her loyal sidekick at her huge meetings. His role was to laugh at her jokes and sing her praises whenever he could. But in his eyes, he looked defeated, and his temper tantrums grew worse and worse. Coming home to see his brown car in the driveway sent chills up my spine. I longed for the days when he was locked up, the days when I could walk into our dark, empty, musty, cold house alone. At least I knew what to expect.
Quietly unlocking the door with my key, I snuck up to my room while Dad worked on something in the garage. Organizing my clothes, I moved them from short and long sleeve categories to just by color and back again. After pushing my desk, bed, and dresser around in every configuration that I could imagine, I stared out my metal-rimmed window as I watched the trees
sway and the wind move the clouds through the dark sky.
While Dad and Noah ate their dinner, I was more comfortable going unnoticed in my room. When they turned the TV on it was so loud my room shook. A few hours later, when the TV clicked off and Dad started his shower, I headed down and grabbed a bowl of Life cereal. Fred watched me as I ate my cereal at my little wobbly desk. When the house got quiet, I went to the bathroom and followed my nightly ritual: I washed my face for 33 seconds, brushed my teeth for 107 seconds, flossed back and forth three times on each tooth, and then brushed my hair for 107 strokes. I skipped my safety checks when Dad was home; I didn’t want to be made fun of for being such a baby.
The next day, I quietly got ready to run out the door, knowing my neighborhood friends, Ceci and Jeani, would be waiting for me at our designated spot, right where our two cul-de-sacs met in the middle. I quickly changed the laundry and fed Fred. Grabbing my sweatshirt off my bed, I ran downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs, I put my sweatshirt on and my elbow bumped into the sliding closet door behind me. Dad lurched out from behind me; I hadn’t known he was in the kitchen. He grabbed me by my sweatshirt and swung me around. Falling to the floor, I tried to push him off.
“You could have broken the door, stupid!” Dad yelled.
I just stared up at him, not wanting him to see how terrified I was. He was furious; there was a rush of chaos around me, pushing and pulling and bashing in a whirlwind. Grabbing my head, he slammed it down, and I rolled over to keep him from hitting my face again. My chin ground against our fake-wood carpet in the kitchen, then Dad pushed my face down into the dusty, black wrought iron railing that separated our kitchen from the family room below. Instantly my eyes filled with water as the railing felt like it was pushing my teeth into my nose and my nose into my eyes. I could taste the dust from the handrail in my blood-soaked mouth, and tried to spit it out on the carpet. At that moment I heard heels on the rock entry; maybe Mom heard us and was coming down. Maybe Noah had come home. Looking up, I saw Ceci and Jeani, arms linked and hands over their mouths, tears streaming down their faces.
Running up to Mom’s room, the warm blood from my nose wouldn’t stop running into my mouth; my lip was fat and throbbing. Pulling her door open, I heard her talking to someone in her ‘talk show host’ voice. I turned the corner so she could see me; she waved me away as I walked closer. When I was standing right in front of her, she fanned me away again, this time with an irritated look. She reached down for her slipper and winged it at me.
Covering the mouthpiece, she whispered, “Shhh, I’m on the phone.”
Running from Mom’s room, I stopped in the bathroom to grab some tissue and put some up my nostrils and under my upper lip. I’d seen my teachers do this when kids got bloody noses at school. I washed my sticky hands and headed into my room. The adrenaline was pulsing through my body. I thought of what the girls had seen and started to sob. Falling to my knees, feeling hopeless and weak, I started to pray. No one had ever talked to me about God, but I’d talked to Him like an imaginary friend for as long as I could remember. Sometimes, if Noah was away, he was the only person I talked to for days. But today I formally introduced myself. “Dear God, it’s me, Lauren. I’m so sorry about Ceci and Jeani. I am so sorry about what they saw and for not locking our door. Please, God, I pray that you can erase what they saw.” I lay in a heap in the middle of my bedroom floor on my crunchy, pink carpet, my body slumped over my folded legs, my head resting on my crossed arms. I lay like that and prayed to God until I fell asleep.
Chapter 8
Seattle’s Alcatraz
Mom yelled down the hall to Noah and me that we had to be dressed and ready to go in a half an hour; we were going to visit Dad, who had been back in jail for a few months. Heading across the bridge into Seattle, I kept my eyes focused outside. Noah was giving Mom some statistics on Lake Washington and I was completely in awe. The dark green lake was glistening; on one side of the floating bridge it was smooth as glass and on the other side it was choppy and white. Noah had an explanation for this that I didn’t understand, but I didn’t care, I just knew that it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. Surrounded by a rim of mountains that looked like they had been dusted with powdered sugar, I gazed happily out my window as we drove over the water.
After about forty-five minutes we arrived at the ferry terminal; we parked our car and walked up to the growing line. Mom gave her name and her driver’s license to the old, slouched man in the booth and he checked her name off a list on a clipboard. Then she gave him her purse; he opened it and gave her a sandwich bag for a few things and handed it back. Then he pointed to a line on the ferry dock. Another man checked Mom off of another list and told us where to sit. The people on this boat seemed a lot different than the people on the ferry we took up to Canada when Grandma and Grandpa came to visit. They weren’t chatting and laughing and pointing at maps and throwing pieces of bread to the hungry seagulls. Everyone on this ferry seemed sad and on edge.
Drifting into the Puget Sound, I couldn’t see land through the thick fog that seemed to hover over the smooth black water. Cutting through the water like a hot knife through Jell-O, we sat on a picnic bench and I listened to Noah and Mom as they chatted about Dad. Still having no idea what he had done, I was hoping for a clue that would shed some light as to why he was at McNeil Island Penitentiary. I overheard a smart-looking man in a suit explaining that this was the Northwest’s version of Alcatraz. After hearing this, I wanted to refuse to go and see him unless my mom told me right now what he’d done. But I’d learned a long time ago that asking questions made Mom upset. She’d either start screaming that you were bringing more suffering to her life by talking about it, or she’d let the waterworks flow, sending Noah or Dad into “protect Mom mode.” If they weren’t around, I’d feel so bad for upsetting her that I’d end up comforting her and apologizing until she calmed down. Either way, questions never led to answers.
The sun was starting to burn through the pea soup fog, revealing a tree-covered island. It looked as if the entire island was surrounded by curling, twisting, metal barbed wire. I thought, how did they do that; how long did it take and what kind of gloves would you have to wear to handle it without getting hurt?
As we headed off the boat down the bouncing metal ramp, we were greeted on the muddy path by a guard. He checked us off the list on his clipboard, and we walked single file up the sloshy, sloppy path. In front of the big metal door, we heard a buzz and the guard pulled the door open. When the smell from the building met my nose, I blew out as hard as I could, shook my head and coughed. It smelled like stale, old, dirty clothes mixed with the worst school lunch imaginable. Trying to take the shallowest breaths I could, I followed the guard as his heavy black boots clunked over the gray tiled floor. He went over a list of rules with us, the tone of his voice sounding like we were in trouble too.
“You may hold hands over the table for no more than ten seconds. No hugging. You may not give the inmate anything. You may not raise your voice,” he droned on. “Now, have a seat and the inmates will be brought out shortly.”
We were sitting in their cafeteria, which explained the smell of hot, rotting garbage.
Dad walked in with a tan jumpsuit on; he sat down on one side of the bench and Noah, Mom and I sat on the other.
“Dad, we are going to get you out of here. Is it scary? Are they mean?” Noah was talking a mile a minute.
Dad looked like a lost schoolboy. I tried my hardest not to look around at the scary men that surrounded me, tugging at my sweatshirt to try to keep it from clinging to my rapidly developing twelve-year-old body. There were babies crying and kids whining. Some people were just chatting as if they were sitting at Sunday brunch. When Dad reached his hand across the table to hold mine, I ripped it away. Going to visit him was bad enough; I wasn’t about to pretend that he was Father of the Year just because he got himself locked up. Mom and Noah stared at me with daggers in their eyes and shook their heads in dis
gust at my behavior. I’d always felt like the less smart, ugly, outsider when I was with them and now their three musketeers bond was even tighter.
*
It was Sunday afternoon, which meant a trip to the market. I’d come up with a week or two worth of meals that I could make with the ingredients we had in our pantry and freezer, and every other Sunday or so Mom would take me to the market with my list of things that wouldn’t keep. If I had to, I could make it three weeks without having to shop. Combing through the aisles, I checked items off my list one by one as I grabbed them off the shelf and marked them off of my list. We finally had enough money to ditch the gross, cement-floored Prairie Market, where we had to not only bag our own groceries but write the price on the cans with a messy black grease pen, too. Shopping at Safeway made me feel rich. Mentally, I went down all of the dinners I could make. I had everything for SOS, shepherd’s pie (this was one of my mom’s favorites; she learned how to make it in Australia, and now I could make it by myself), tuna casserole with green beans, lasagna Hamburger Helper and about six of the biggest boxes of cereal I could find.
*
In my room, I could hear Mom talking to a lady who worked with her. “We are going to fight this thing right up to the Supreme Court. Joel is innocent, and he has been gone over a year now, bounced around from jail to prison, all because Sid needed someone to take the fall.”
My ears really perked up; maybe I would finally know what my dad had done. Because of his terrible temper and his pervy ways, I assumed that he had raped and/or killed someone.
“Oh, you don’t know the story?” Mom went on. “I thought everyone knew.”
Great, she thought everyone knew, but she wouldn’t say one word about it to me or any of our neighbors or any of our teachers or anyone in our family. So, by everyone, I guessed what she meant was everyone in her business.