by Brad Parks
Maybe Dad liked that part more than Mom.
Dad became a commercial fisherman, and the pattern of their life was pretty simple. My father would go out on long trips at sea, sometimes for weeks at a time, then return to her, happy and flush with cash. Life would be good for a little while, until he started drinking.
Then, inevitably, he’d get pissed off about something (or nothing) and beat the hell out of her.
One time I recall, he went berserk on her because there were some ants crawling in the garbage—the result of her slack housekeeping, he claimed—and that she had allowed creeper vines to climb up the house while he was gone.
Other times it was money. Or because he imagined she had flirted with some guy. Or because of some transgression only he understood.
The next morning, he’d apologize, swearing to God he was never going to do it again. Then he’d go back out to sea. When he returned, the cycle would repeat itself, like some kind of brutal tide.
Why my mother—who had once been smart, and pretty, and surely had better options—stayed with a man like that is testimony to how abuse can alter a person’s psyche. She not only stayed, she doubled down on the relationship, giving birth to me.
By then, I think Mom already knew what she was in for. My middle name was supposed to be Hope, after Dad’s grandmother. But when the hospital asked her what to put on the birth certificate, Mom changed it to Anne without telling him.
Nine years after me, there was the surprise/accident/miracle that was my brother, Teddy.
I don’t know why my mother thought having more children would change my father or tame him. It surely didn’t. Some of my earliest memories are of an assortment of caseworkers, their brows creased with concern as they tried to pull details out of me about the latest episode.
My childhood became a revolving door of living situations. I never fully understood the logic of the caseworkers: why some of my father’s tirades resulted in removal from the home, while others (which had seemed, to me, much worse) did not.
I came to fear the group homes, which could be savage tests of survival between hardened foster kids who had learned to battle for whatever meager scraps of love, food, or adult attention that might be available.
The foster placements were more hit or miss. Some were nice enough that I cried when I was ripped away from them to be sent back to my parents.
Others were rougher, particularly the ones that were so obviously only in it for the paycheck. The state chipped in about $500 a month for my housing, feeding, and clothing, and it was amazing how little of that some of them could spend on me.
One of my foster mothers had a biological kid, a girl, to go along with three foster kids—two boys and me. The girl had her own room. I shared a room with the two boys. When we weren’t in school, the three foster kids were booted out every day and told we couldn’t return to the house until dinner. We were given a small bagged lunch, which I usually finished by about ten thirty in the morning. I have these memories of long afternoons in the backyard, peering jealously through the windows at my foster sister as she ate snacks in front of the television.
At another home, I was one of eight foster kids crammed into two bedrooms. The foster mother enjoyed pitting us against one another, encouraging us to report minor transgressions and then devising punishments for whoever had committed them. One time, after one of my compatriots turned me in for having hoarded a small stash of food in the closet, she cut off my hair in uneven chunks. Then she marched me into the boys’ bedroom in my underwear and forced me to tell them I was a sneak and a liar.
These placements were followed by returns home for stints that could last anywhere from a few months to a year or so, depending on how artful my father was at hiding the results of his angry hands and how much he could cow my mother into silence.
My mother loved me, in her own fashion. She called me “pumpkin”—a name that still makes my skin crawl a little—and brushed my long hair much more tenderly than any foster mother did. She always made sure I had access to books and let me read as much as I wanted, allowing me to disappear into imagined worlds that were so much less chaotic than my own.
But she didn’t do the one thing she really ought to have done to protect me, which was leave Billy Curran for good.
The pattern—home, then foster care, then home—continued until I was nine. By that point, my mother was fully addicted to the pain pills that were prescribed to her every time my father gave her a fresh round of bruises. Eventually she started having sex with a doctor in exchange for a steady supply of Vicodin, Percocet, or whatever he could get his hands on.
She was in a stupor one day when Teddy was found crawling out near Route 360, the major thoroughfare in Northumberland County, wearing nothing but a dirty diaper. Social Services swooped in again, like usual. But that time, my half sister, Charlotte, dropped the bomb that my father had been sexually abusing her, pretty much from the moment she developed hips.
A caseworker delivered my drug-muddled mother an ultimatum: Get sober and leave her husband or lose her children for good.
She chose him over us, voluntarily signing over her parental rights. Only people who work with the chronically abused and chemically dependent could recognize her logic.
That was twenty-two years ago. I haven’t had contact with either of my parents since.
Once I became a full-time ward of the state, my life only became more unanchored. I understood there was no going “home” anymore, because I didn’t have one. But I could never anticipate when the next move was coming, nor was anyone especially concerned with explaining to me why it was happening.
Had I done something bad? Were my straight A’s not good enough? If I were a better kid, would they have sent me to a nicer place? Who, exactly, should I be most angry with? My latest foster parent? My latest caseworker? Myself?
Then, sometime in college, I decided I was through with the overanalyzing, the recriminations, the attempts at truth and reconciliation. Being a foster kid had defined my childhood, yes. But it was only going to define me as an adult if I let it.
I had survived. That’s what mattered. And I never had to go back.
So to now have Alex coming into contact with that world was a vicious kind of cruelty, like an aftershock from an earthquake that should have been too far gone to still move the ground.
Yet there I was, sitting outside Social Services, shaking and cowering from this fresh temblor.
* * *
• • •
Eventually, I picked myself off the ground and wobbled to my car. Ben would be home soon. I wanted to be there when he arrived.
Our house is a tidy, three-bedroom postwar ranch. It sits alongside the eerily monikered Desper Hollow Road, named decades ago after the Desper family, a few of whom still live there. It is just outside the Staunton city limits, in what is quite literally the other side of the tracks: As soon as you turn off Route 250, you cross under a railroad trestle.
We bought our place when we first learned I was pregnant. I told Ben I couldn’t bring the baby home to the ground-floor apartment where I had been living. Not after what had happened there.
I wanted a proper house, one with four walls and a white picket fence and cheerful little flower boxes hung under the windows out front. It must have been the pregnancy hormones, filling me with the urge to feather a nest.
Ben, who was in the final throes of earning a PhD in history, made a few noises about the enormity of his student-loan debts, which would begin crushing us not long after he finished his program. He also pointed out we had no idea where he would end up getting a job. There had been hints he could maybe/possibly hook on at James Madison, where it was looking like there might be a retirement in the history department around the time he defended his dissertation, but there were certainly no guarantees. We had to be ready to move anywhere.
Ultimate
ly, though, he gave in. We took our entire rainy-day fund and sunk it into the down payment—then started hoping like hell it never rained.
We closed on it last October, when I was about seven months pregnant, then spent the next two months fixing it up as much as we could before Alex made his big arrival. We borrowed a power washer to clean the grunge off the exterior. My friend Marcus came over with hedge trimmers and hacked back the overgrown bushes, allowing light to pour through the windows. His wife, Kelly, helped us paint.
Then there was Ben’s surprise housewarming present to me: a beautiful, brand-new white picket fence. He was coy about how he had come up with the money for it. He joked he had sold a kidney.
We also hung some flower boxes under the windows. It was too late to really put anything in them, but Ben found tulip bulbs on end-of-season clearance and, together, we stuck them in the dirt.
For someone with my peripatetic past, there was a wonderful optimism about being able to plant something that wouldn’t show itself for many months. This was the first place I could ever really think of as permanent after thirty-one years of near-constant itinerancy. And it was both dizzying and dazzling to think that by the time those flowers blossomed, we’d have a baby.
The green shoots had started to come up not long ago. Being that we were deep in the grind of new parenthood—the sleepless nights, the early mornings, the tyranny of an infant’s demands—it was a nice reminder of the excitement we once had.
I tried to reassure myself, as I made the turn onto Desper Hollow Road and crossed under the tracks, that nothing had really changed. I was still going to gape at those flowers with Alex, watching one tiny miracle discover another. This was going to end up okay.
Then I reached the mailbox at the end of our driveway and made the turn up toward our house. That’s when I realized there was police tape stretched across our front door.
SIX
Once I was out of my car, I saw the yellow tape wasn’t the only way in which the peace and tranquility of our home had been disturbed.
The flower boxes had been removed and emptied. The dirt was piled on the ground next to them. The bulbs were lying on their side, scattered haphazardly about. Some of the stalks had been bent or broken by the rough treatment.
My hand flew to my mouth. I felt my throat constricting again.
Had the police done this? They must have. But . . . why?
And did this have something to do with Alex?
They told me all about you. I hope they get that baby as far away from you as possible.
After a few halting steps, I stopped, almost afraid to enter my house. If this is what they had done to the flower boxes, what would the inside look like? I stood there, paralyzed by uncertainty and dread.
Soon my attention was diverted by a flashlight beam, bobbing my way from down the hill. I felt myself stiffen. For a lot of reasons, I’m uneasy about being approached by strangers in the dark. Or any other time, for that matter.
I relaxed—a little—when I heard a familiar voice say, “Hey. Saw you drivin’ up.”
It was my neighbor, Bobby Ray Walters, a large slab of a man whose ample body fat had curiously solid properties. Bobby Ray was one of the last remaining Desper descendants. He saw nothing wrong with flying the Confederate flag outside his trailer, eagerly seized on every conspiracy theory that floated across the Internet, and lived in this fantastical alternate reality where the government was coming to strip him of his guns any moment.
He often referred to his large stockpile of munitions in casual conversation; and, in case anyone missed the hint, there was a hand-painted sign that read WARNING: SECOND AMENDMENT ENTHUSIAST prominently displayed outside his trailer. He also protected his property with a series of cameras, which he advertised with another hand-painted (if grammatically impaired) sign that read SMILE! YOUR ON CAMERA!
Our differing attitudes about politics aside, he was the kind of guy who never met a stranger. If he was sitting in one of the beat-up couches he used for outdoor furniture when I drove by, he waved, usually with his non-Budweiser-holding hand. He even cut our grass for us after we moved in when he realized we didn’t yet own a lawnmower.
Once or twice he said things that made me think he had spent time in prison. I didn’t pry into the details. And now I found myself backing up a step or two as he crowded my personal space.
“Sheriff was here,” he volunteered, in case I hadn’t figured it out. “I saw ’em rolling up ’bout three o’clock. There were, like, five or six of ’em. They walked right into the place like they owned it. Didn’t knock or nothing. Two of them started digging up your flowers, like they were looking for something in there. They were just throwing dirt everywhere, so I came over and said, ‘Hey, you don’t need to go doing that.’ They told me to mind my own business and just kept doing it, the sumbitches.”
He spoke with a kind of clannish affection for me that I hadn’t heard before. I could guess why. To people who have no idea how I grew up, I come off as having an air of privilege. They heard my Yankee accent, the words I used or the ideas I expressed—all of which came from books I got out of the library, for free—and assumed it was the result of having parents who lavished money on private schools or sent me to Europe for the summer. They didn’t look carefully enough at my teeth to see that I never had braces.
They definitely didn’t see me after I graduated college. Unemployed—but without parents to move back in with, like most of my classmates—I was three months behind on my rent when my landlord told me he was kicking me out unless I gave him a blow job. He further suggested he could pimp me out, and that I might have a nice income waiting for me if I would dye my dark hair blond and surgically enhance my B cups into D’s.
That was how I ended up living in my car. When I finally landed that job at Starbucks, I was just grateful they didn’t notice I was sneaking food off customers’ trays until my first paycheck came in.
Now that I was back on my feet, I’d like to think I hid those scars well. So, to Bobby Ray, this was my rite of passage, having the Sheriff’s Office run roughshod over my stuff, just like all the other poor white trash.
“They came over when they were done and I told ’em to get the hell off my property,” he continued. “I guess they wanted to know if I had seen a lot of people coming and going from your place. Like, you know, was you selling drugs and stuff.”
“Drugs!” I blurted.
“Well, that’s what I said,” Bobby Ray insisted. “I told ’em, ‘No, no, you got it all wrong. It ain’t like that. Her husband, he’s a professor or something up at the university. They high class.’ But they just looked at me like maybe I was hiding something, like I must have been in on it or whatever. You know how they look at you, like they already made up their minds you’re a piece a crap.”
He took in a sharp breath, then held it, stifling the hiccup that was trying to escape.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
He looked at me with renewed sympathy. “Don’t go gettin’ your panties in a twist. Sheriff’s gonna do what the sheriff’s gonna do. Long as they didn’t find nothing, you got nothing to worry about.”
Then he bobbed his head toward the bulbs. “’Cept maybe getting yourself some new flowers.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, bringing my hand to my mouth again.
Bobby Ray stuffed his hands in his pockets and shivered a little.
“All right. If you need something, just give a holler,” he said.
“Thanks, Bobby Ray.”
And then he was off, his flashlight beam pointing back down the hill, toward his trailer.
I turned to face my house.
Long as they didn’t find nothing, you got nothing to worry about.
I took a deep breath. There were no drugs in my house that I knew of. I would never bring something like that near Alex.
I’m not sure I
could say the same about his uncle Teddy.
* * *
• • •
The boy who was born William Theodore Curran Jr. got his name from my father. I can only assume his taste for medication came from my mother.
He was just a baby when we were taken from our parents’ home for the final time. Our caseworker was an astute woman who understood that I had basically assumed the role of Teddy’s mother, changing his diapers, feeding him, bathing him. If we remained together, I’d keep right on doing it—depriving me of a childhood, and Teddy of a more suitable mother.
So she split us up. She literally had to pry him from my arms.
She promised he would stay close by, and that I could visit him whenever I wanted. But that was a lie. While I languished in foster care, Teddy was quickly adopted by a local couple.
Then his new parents moved to Staunton. For me, losing Teddy was far more devastating than having my parents terminate their rights. Charlotte had already vanished by that point, having fled from a group home. Teddy was my entire family.
I conned his new address out of my caseworker, saying I wanted to write him a letter. Then I ran away from my foster home, taking a bus to Staunton. After the third time I did this, my caseworker offered a deal: If she found a placement for me in Staunton, I’d behave. That’s how I ended up in the Shenandoah valley.
To me, Teddy was a beam of pure sunshine, a creative, energetic little boy. To everyone else, his adopted mother included, he was a problem child: obviously dyslexic (though his mother resisted having him tested), acting out in school from a young age, a troublemaker. Before long, vandalism begat cigarettes, which begat marijuana, which begat harder drugs and the petty thefts required to support his burgeoning habit.
I kept up a relationship with him the whole time, but I couldn’t stay on him the way I needed to. Being penniless and near starvation doesn’t leave you with a lot of wherewithal to help others.