Even as she did well in school, curfews had no hold on Shannan, and most evenings she’d find her way back to Ellenville. While her sisters welcomed her, the wild card on those nights was Mari. In difficult moments, Shannan’s mother would seize power any way she could: sometimes by leaving the room, sometimes by temporarily writing people out of her life. Once, after Shannan got into a fight during a party at her friend Anthony’s house, Mari ordered Shannan never to speak with Anthony again. It was startling how, almost randomly, Mari would decide to step back into Shannan’s world and issue orders—as a way of reminding everyone she was still the mother, the most important person in Shannan’s life. Their confrontations invariably ended with Shannan in tears. However the argument started, Shannan brought the subject back to the same place. “You don’t want me,” she’d say, crying. “You don’t raise me, but you raise my sisters.” When she heard that, Mari would turn cold. She wouldn’t argue. She would just turn and leave.
After graduation, Shannan spiraled away from Ellenville for longer and longer stretches. She lived for a time with her grandmother and enrolled in nursing classes. She worked at a hotel, an Applebee’s, and a senior center, as a secretary at a school. Within a year, she dropped out of college and quit the secretarial job, saying it bored her. She left her grandmother’s house after being reprimanded for staying out too late. She had a boyfriend whom the family met only once or twice before she said she had left him and was planning to move to New York City.
She was too old to run home anymore. She had something more ambitious in mind, a new role. She would audition for singing jobs, do whatever she could to make money. She would build a life that her sisters and her mother could only dream about. She would become an entrepreneur, a self-made woman. She would have the best of everything. She would become their benefactor. And they would be grateful to her. And they would love her.
MEGAN
Happy Wheels is tucked away in a bland stucco building off an access road in an industrial section of Portland, Maine. The roller rink, with a wood interior barely updated from the early eighties, is built for wear and tear. The pop music blares. For generations, Happy Wheels has been a reliable Saturday and Sunday destination for working families from Portland, including the struggling section of Congress Street downtown, where Megan Waterman lived. The prices have barely changed in twenty years. Even now, admission on a regular night is just $5.50, and skate rentals cost two dollars.
Far and away the most popular event at Happy Wheels—more popular than the roller derby nights—is the monthly twelve-dollar All-Night Skate. Parents all over town, particularly struggling families on a budget, know of Happy Wheels as a safe space where they can take a much-needed night off, dropping kids off at eight P.M. and not coming back until six A.M. Even as young as ten or twelve, Megan was determined never to miss an All-Night Skate. Moon-faced and bubbly and blond, she cut loose on the floor and sang with unique abandon. She never seemed to care what a soul thought of her, and a lot of the other children envied her for that. Few people there knew much about her mother, Lorraine, who had lost custody of Megan when she was a baby. All they knew was that Megan was being brought up by her grandmother.
Part of Happy Wheels’s appeal—for parents, at least—is its strict no-fight policy. If you’re caught misbehaving twice, you get a Happy Wheels rap sheet: Your name ends up on a pink piece of paper in a loose-leaf binder in the front office, and you’re sent home for the night. Get in a fight, and you’re out for longer: a thirty-day suspension for the first offense, whether you started the fight or not. The second offense is six months. The third is a year. The fourth is permanent. Most of the kids who roll through Happy Wheels never learn about the binder, and the staff never learns their names. But Megan, they knew. Her young life was detailed practically week by week in the binder. The trouble tended to flare out of nowhere, usually over some teenage drama: “Your hair’s purple, I don’t like it” or “I don’t like the way you look at my boyfriend.”
Still, the staff had a soft spot for Megan. They marveled at the way she could pivot from rage to charm in an instant, working her deep brown eyes to make anyone forgive whatever she’d done. And they always thought fondly of her nana, Muriel, who stood out from all the other parents in how passionately she’d defend Megan on charges of misbehavior—appealing any ejection while standing right beside her, acting like her chief counsel. The people behind the counter never thought the worse of them for trying to sidestep the rules. What kid isn’t wild sometimes? they’d think as Megan walked out the door, fuming. Good for her nana, everyone thought, for going the extra mile for her granddaughter.
Muriel Benner brought her six children up more or less on her own in downtown Portland, first on the bustling main drag of Congress Street and then in a townhouse-style condo just off Congress at 16 Avon Place. This was low-income housing, built on an intimate scale—a safe street with no through traffic and just twenty or so families who all knew and looked after one another. Muriel was tan and impish, shaped like a dumpling, and managed to date and have as much fun as she could. The children remember a parade of men through the house, and lots of leftover drinks for them to sip from the coffee table the next day. Lorraine’s favorite had been Allen’s coffee-flavored brandy.
Muriel was the sort of mother who tended to separate her kids into little files in her head: a tempting enough thing to do if, like Muriel, you had so many. Kathy, Liz, Ella, and Eli—they were good. Lorraine and Ricky, they were trouble. Early on, she had branded Lorraine—Muriel’s first child with her second husband, Ricky Waterman—as something more than bad. She had been the family dissident, never satisfied, forever outraged.
Then Lorraine got pregnant, and Muriel held her breath. The problem wasn’t the baby. Lorraine was twenty, and she wasn’t the first of Muriel’s children to have children of their own. The problem was Lorraine.
A year earlier, Lorraine had moved out of her mother’s house and found a room at the YWCA in downtown Portland. She had been working for a small company that cleaned the airport and offices, and she spent her off hours trying to get her GED. She moved out because her mother let her hold on to only fifty dollars a week out of her paychecks. Why am I working just to give her all the money? she thought. So she left. Lorraine had been on her own for a month when she met Greg Gove. He was the first boy to come up and talk to her since she’d left home. He was tall and skinny. He was only four days older than she was, and like her, he hadn’t finished high school. He was from Wilmington, Maine. His aunt had kicked him out because he didn’t want to work, and now he was doing odd jobs.
They went out to eat at a Bonanza steak house by the Maine Mall, the mammoth shopping center in South Portland. They had nothing in common, but Lorraine had never had a boyfriend; within a month, they were living together. They rented a room together on Sherman Street in a rough section of Portland. It was full of cockroaches, so they left. Then they stayed at the Days Inn in Westbrook, renting a room by the week.
Lorraine drank a lot after meeting Greg. Coffee brandy was still her favorite. In no time, the relationship darkened. Lorraine’s memories of her time with Greg were Gothic, filled with abuse, though Greg, now married with a large family and living several hours from Portland in northern Maine, recalled that things turned violent on both sides. Within months, though, she was pregnant. Lorraine left Greg but returned in time to have their first baby—a boy, also named Greg. They broke up again when she was eight months pregnant with their second child, Megan. As the pregnancy advanced, she quit her most recent job, at Burger King, and went on welfare. Lorraine was sure she was done with Greg for good this time. To her surprise, he turned up again, this time with a new girlfriend named Karen. Greg and Karen offered to help Lorraine with both babies if they could all crash in the apartment that Lorraine was paying for with her welfare check.
Lorraine said yes. Lorraine and little Greg slept in the bedroom. Big Greg and Karen slept in the living room on the floor. This was
the home Megan Waterman was born into, on January 18, 1988—a rented room occupied by her mother, her father, and her father’s new girlfriend. And this was when Muriel reentered Lorraine’s life and took her children away from her.
Muriel and everyone else in the family heard the stories: The baby would not be changed all day; Lorraine would smack little Greg; someone saw little Greg toddling around next to an open oven with gas heat pouring out of it; someone else saw little Greg eating cereal off the floor. Muriel hadn’t liked the father, big Greg, much to begin with, and then she found out that little Greg had a bruise on his nose. One of her other daughters told her that big Greg and a friend were tossing little Greg around the room, and one of them was too close to the door casing and spun around too quickly, tagging little Greg right across the bridge of the nose. “That,” Muriel said, “was when I started telling the state.”
Together with Lorraine’s sisters, Liz and Kathy, Muriel worked to start a file on Lorraine, writing down what they saw happening with the baby. When she was accused, Lorraine’s response was achingly familiar to Muriel. When she couldn’t deny, she shifted blame. Nothing was her fault. The bruise? Little Greg had a vein visible under the first layer of skin—a dark smudge everyone only thought was a bruise. The cereal on the floor? Little Greg would never eat milk in his cereal, Lorraine said, so she’d put cereal in a bowl, and he’d walk around with it and sit down in the kitchen and dump it on the floor. And the oven? Big Greg, the father, would turn the oven on and open up the door for heat, and Lorraine would always shut the door for safety. “I was shutting it!” Lorraine said.
When Megan was born, she had an abnormal blood test—nothing serious, just something that needed to be monitored. Lorraine was supposed to bring the baby back for a follow-up test, but she kept dodging the social workers, going elsewhere on the days when home visits were scheduled. Muriel became alarmed that the state couldn’t seem to track Lorraine down, even though they received state aid. Finally, Muriel discovered that Megan was in the hospital with respiratory distress. That was when Muriel said she applied for custody.
The state had foster care ready for emergency situations, and when Megan left the hospital, she, along with little Greg, were taken from Lorraine and placed directly in foster care. While Muriel’s custody application drifted through the system, Muriel and Doug would drive every Sunday morning to visit the babies in Naples, an hour north of the city. Lorraine was supposed to go with them, but Muriel said they could never find her. Muriel, meanwhile, began to bond with the children—more, she suggested, than Lorraine ever had. Small as they were, she thought the babies anticipated her arrival, getting up early on their own. Little Greg was talking now. Some of his first words, Muriel said, were “Nana coming!”
In a crusade she looks back on with pride and satisfaction, Megan’s nana started gently campaigning to take the babies for a day here, a day there—rising at three A.M. on a Saturday after working five days at a watch shop, grabbing coffee to stay awake, driving to Naples and back, and doing it all again that evening. Muriel befriended the foster family and asked for more time: “Can we take them all weekend?” The family said yes. All the way back on Sunday night, Muriel would cry. Her boss at the watch shop took pity on her, because she often couldn’t do her job until Wednesday. Friday night couldn’t come fast enough. Muriel wanted them all the time. Finally, three months into the fostership, the family let Muriel keep the babies all week—unbeknownst to the state.
Lorraine came around from time to time, but her visits started to grate on Muriel. She found her daughter too cavalier, as if she didn’t realize how much the babies needed a mother. Sometimes, when Lorraine reneged on a visit, Muriel would swear that Megan and little Greg felt jilted. After a while, she told Lorraine, “If you’re not here within ten minutes of when you say you’ll be here, don’t bother coming.”
Lorraine had her suspicions. She thought she knew what Muriel’s bid for custody was really about. Eli, Muriel’s youngest, was turning eighteen. The nest was emptying. And without a child at home, Muriel and Doug wouldn’t qualify anymore for their federal welfare subsidy, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Without a child, Muriel would have to leave Avon Place. Without a child, her mother would be homeless.
Soon her inkling became a deeply felt conviction. Could it really have been a coincidence that Muriel started calling the state on a regular basis just a few months before Eli’s birthday? “She knew what she was doing,” Lorraine said. “It was constant income.”
If the accusation seemed a little too convenient—another case of Lorraine shifting the blame—it also happened to be true, at least in part. While Muriel genuinely loved the children, Lorraine’s sister Ella has acknowledged that government support did play a part in Muriel’s decision to take them in. One of the first things Muriel did when the kids came to her house was to apply for AFDC funding. Still, Ella said, Muriel was the only one who seemed to be actively trying to secure the well-being of the children. “It was my mother who had done all the work,” Ella said, “like fighting to get them.” Lorraine’s three sisters all came to the same conclusion. What Lorraine may have overlooked—or been willfully blind to—is the fact that no matter why Muriel wanted the children, her mother was still a better bet than she was.
Lorraine fought for custody at first. She got an attorney. So did Greg Gove. The day they went into court, Muriel took Lorraine aside and delivered an ultimatum. She said if Lorraine signed the children over to her, she would still be able to see them; if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to see them at all.
There was no third option. Lorraine had no way of disproving the case. “We threw in the towel,” Greg recalled. They signed away custody. Lorraine’s lawyer, once he turned up, said, “You should’ve never done that, Lorraine.”
Lorraine stared at the lawyer in anguish. “What was I supposed to do?”
Muriel raised Megan and her brother as if they were her own. Greg Gove visited the children for a few years before leaving town. Lorraine saw them, too, but only when Muriel had the patience to allow it. That turned out to be just enough exposure to earn Megan and Greg’s unbridled resentment and anger. Many of Megan’s closest friends didn’t even know she had a mother, and those who did knew that Megan despised her. Greg felt the same way. “My grandmother was like my mother,” he said. “My grandfather was the only father I knew. They gave me all my Christmases and all my birthdays. My mom will blame it all on my grandmother till she’s blue in the face. But no, we’d never see her. All we had was us.”
The social worker never forgot the day she met Megan: She stood a few feet from the breakfast table and watched as Megan and Greg got into a fistfight right in front of her over a piece of toast. Megan was nine and Greg was ten, but they were evenly matched. They raged at each other, no holds barred, hitting, pulling hair, screeching.
Jo Moser had come to 16 Avon Place as a parenting coach. She saw how worried Muriel was about the children. Their volatility was rattling her: children who would scream “Fuck you!” to anyone they wanted, even running out on the street and yelling it to the whole neighborhood. Muriel knew she was in over her head. Doug had heart trouble and couldn’t work as many hours driving a truck, and Muriel, now in her fifties, was a softie, hard on Megan and Greg one minute and then giving them anything the next. Moser remembered a lot of chaos in the house—friends, family, and acquaintances filing in and out. She remembered a household in a constant state of anxiety over money, a family living from check to check. When Moser started taking Greg and Megan to the all-you-can-eat buffet at the China Wall, near the Maine Mall in Portland, the kids couldn’t stop eating.
In the first few years, she saw the children two or three times a week, for a few hours each time. Megan resisted until Moser told her that if she didn’t want to meet, she might not get to live with Nana. Megan agreed, and over the course of a decade, Moser came to adore Megan, even if she was hell on wheels, or maybe because of it. Greg mouthed off, dit
ched school, got into fights, stole money. The social workers saw kids like him all week long. But Megan was one of a kind. She always felt that she ruled the house, and she did. She could talk her grandfather into pretty much anything, and she ran hot and cold on Muriel—from “I don’t care anything about her” to crying about how much she needed her. What Megan wanted most of all was freedom, and Muriel lacked the resolve to contain her. The word Moser wrote in her notebook over and over was defiance.
At Reiche Elementary School in Portland, Megan was more hostile and threatening than her brother. Four or five boys would gang up on Greg after school, down at the bottom of the ramp, and when Megan started down the ramp, they took off. She had the police called on her for the first time in first grade. There was a bridge connecting the buildings, thirty feet above the sidewalk, and she climbed over the railing and wouldn’t come back. By second grade, there was, courtesy of the McGeachey Hall Mental Health Center in Portland, a diagnosis: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She lasted at Reiche Elementary until fifth grade, when she was transferred to a school for troubled kids called Prep, where some of the students were afraid of her. She was finally removed from public school when she tried to dunk a kid’s head underwater in the school’s swimming pool. She wasn’t trying to drown him—just trying to get a reaction, to make people laugh. What scared the school was that Megan didn’t seem to realize how dangerous it was.
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