The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  At one point in the conversation, Tena sought to share in the blame for Amber’s travails. Tena had, after all, been homeless for a couple of years before Brownwood, bouncing around friends’ and relations’ apartments, dealing meth, depending on the worst men. What had happened was not only Amber’s fault but both of theirs.

  “You know, if I would have been a better grandmother and if you weren’t smoking methamphetamines, if you would have been a better mother and a better support system for your daughter, God wouldn’t have let Madyson get took away,” Tena said. “That’s my perception of it—whether it be true or not.”

  Amber said that her mom was still living in the past and with regret. Channeling the lessons of the front door of her refrigerator, Amber told Tena that she had to forgive, not pity, herself.

  Tena wouldn’t have it. “I blame myself for losing Madyson,” she said, “and we weren’t even together when we were getting high. But I feel like, if I had been at home, doing this job thing like I do every day, being a stronger backbone, maybe she wouldn’t have been out there doing that.” Here she was looking at Amber.

  This Amber didn’t like. She said, “I would have been doing what I wanted to do, regardless of what you were doing.”

  Tena had been the family pioneer in discovering Brownwood. Back in Dallas, bumming around homes not her own, Tena had one day mustered the courage to check herself into the Green Oaks psychiatric hospital. They recommended a sober-living house in Brownwood, and she agreed. Tena stayed in that house for a time, until they discovered that she lacked insurance of any kind, which was a requirement there. They pushed her out to a government-financed treatment center, where she remained for twenty-eight days.

  Finally, she had ended up in a different sober house from Amber’s, but also in Brownwood, where she paid $100 a week in rent and lived with two others also in recovery. The house had an 11 p.m. curfew during the week, stretched to 1 a.m. on weekends. Even to stay at Amber’s tonight, Tena had to obtain a pass.

  For Tena, an essential part of recovery was getting her faith right. “I know there’s a God,” she said, “but sometimes I think God would do more for Desireé than He will for me. God will take care of Desireé and her problems before He will mine. And that’s just because of the way I’ve lived my life. I feel like my God—I’ve turned my God to a punishing God, a strict God, a disappointed God, a God that’s not happy with me.” Sometimes Tena flirted with polytheism by imagining her unitary Christian God as more like a brand with franchises: “If I need to, I borrow Amber’s God, because Amber’s God answers her prayers; Amber’s God takes care of her; Amber’s God loves her. So if I have to, I’ll borrow her God until I can identify who my God is.”

  The sober house was just transitional. It was training wheels to learn to get out on your own. Because of it, Tena felt the ground beneath her shifting as never before—and not only related to her addiction. She realized, when faced with the reality of things, that she had never, until now, understood the meaning of work and of independence.

  “I always depended,” Tena said. “I never depended on myself. And today I know, in order for me to have anything, I have to work. You know, nothing comes easy.” She felt good: “I’m self-supported. I work every day. I pay my rent. Every two weeks, I pay my rent. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I’ve always handed off to somebody.” The equation had become clear to her now: “If I work, my rent gets paid. If I don’t work, my rent don’t get paid.”

  The country often argued about people like Tena. What would right her path, or give her a chance to rise, or help her to help herself? What, ultimately, was responsible for her condition—social structures, underfunded rehab and psychiatric care, dismal parenting, a decadent culture?

  The trouble with these arguments was that they so often forced a choice between caring for the weakest and honoring their agency. The left-leaning political half of the country that spoke most eloquently about the poor and vulnerable could be less comfortable judging their family structures and child-rearing habits, telling them the truth about culture and behavior, burdening them with the consequences of their decisions; the right-leaning political half of the country, more comfortable with such judgment and truth-telling, tended not to make underdogs their highest priority.

  Here in Brownwood, for the time being at least, Tena and Amber seemed to have found a kind of middle ground—their own blend of judgment and compassion, structure and freedom. They felt themselves newly alive. “I have self-respect,” Tena said. “I have my kids’ respect. You know, for a long time, that one right there was real disappointed in me.” She gestured at Erica. Then, on Father’s Day this year, Tena had received a text message from Erica that floored her. It reminded Tena how far she had come. It said, “Thank you for being both.”

  Amber’s cell phone rang. She had been planning to turn it off in the next day or so, to save money, but it was on today, and it was Grandma on the line from Stephenville, probably with some question about Madyson. Amber picked up. The call went on and on, and Amber sat looking progressively grimmer as it continued. Her side of the conversation didn’t sound good.

  “Yeah, he’s her daddy—I understand that,” she said to Grandma. “But she doesn’t know him like that.”

  Pause. “Well, I’m sorry my family isn’t as perfect as yours!”

  Pause. “So you’re saying Erica can’t see Madyson? Well, if that’s your choice right now. You are the sole conservator of Madyson. There’s nothing I can say. All I can tell you is Erica’s never put Madyson in any kind of danger. When I was fucking up, when I was off doing my thing, Erica was the only one there.”

  When Amber hung up, everyone wanted a debrief. As it turned out, it had been a strange call, and Amber needed the group’s interpretation.

  On the surface of things, Grandma had called to offer Amber some advice. She knew Amber wanted Madyson back, and she was calling because she had come upon some things that might complicate that wish. She purported to be telling Amber what to repair so as not to screw up Madyson’s eventual return.

  Grandma complained, for starters, about the dodgy apartment complex where Erica and Desireé lived, and where Madyson sometimes spent the day. She had heard that there were people coming in and out of their apartment at all hours.

  Erica countered that they went over to other apartments for flour, sugar, toilet paper—stuff like that. Desireé was slightly more honest: “Does she not understand I’m a teenager and my friends are going to come over?”

  Grandma also complained about a man named Ricky, who lived in that same complex and who she heard was doing drugs.

  No one contested Ricky’s drug issues, although Erica pointed out that Ricky lived in his own apartment. There was now some speculation about who was ratting out Ricky. This speculation converged on yet another friend called Whitney.

  Most ominously, and least baselessly, Grandma had complained about Erica’s drinking. She worried that Erica was often drunk when taking care of Madyson, as she regularly did.

  That pissed Erica off. She drank only a six-pack a day. “If I had more money, I’d probably drink more,” she admitted. (When Erica later retold the story to her manager at McDonald’s, her six-pack shrank to a two-pack.)

  Once Grandma’s allegations had been detailed, and rebutted, the group could step back and assess what the call had meant. It was sort of random, out of nowhere, this sudden litany of worries. Amber, though rattled at first, now reached an interpretation of the call that left her very happy.

  “What it is, is she’s knowing and she’s seeing that it’s getting closer and closer for me to get Madyson back, so she’s starting shit,” Amber said. “She’s nitpicking at every little bitty thing. And she knows that she’s taking a chance on letting Tyler move back, because she knows if he fucks up one time, she’s fucked. They will remove Madyson. They’ll come investigate me. And if they see that I’m doing what I need to be doing, she’s coming home. That’s what that phone call was
about.”

  When Madyson’s father returned, he could be randomly drug-tested at any time. If history was a guide, this was a test he was unlikely to pass. Grandma, everyone agreed, was worried and trying to generate additional reasons why Madyson should be kept from the Stromans. Perhaps she thought that if she registered the complaints now, they would predate any drug test and thus have greater validity.

  The call persuaded Amber that her legal action against Grandma was going to be important. She had to have a good lawyer. Tena, hearing this, suggested one possibility. Maybe that nice Rais man would be able to help. Maybe he’d know how to find—or even pay for—a lawyer, so that Amber could get her baby back. Amber said yes, good idea, she would talk to him. She hadn’t spoken to him in a while, but she felt confident that Rais would help if asked.

  “He told me, ‘You lost a dad, but you gained an uncle,’ ” Amber told her family. That earned a general, impressed murmur among the women.

  Presently Annette walked in. She was Amber’s sponsor in the AA meetings and the sturdiest pillar in her life right now. She was a lean, hard-bitten woman; life and chemicals had worn her down from the pudginess that endured on her driver’s license. She blew into the room with the verve and willingness to kick ass that had endeared her to Amber and spared her charge uncountable backslides.

  Amber told Annette about the phone call, and the idea of getting a lawyer and all the rest of it. Annette was of the view that Amber didn’t need to mess with all that; she just needed to stick with the program. Annette, now well into middle age, had been in the program since age thirteen.

  “God is taking care of this,” Annette said, standing in the doorway. “When it’s time for you to have a lawyer, it will come. Don’t stress yourself right now. Anything that has to do with the law or any of that crap, it don’t fit in your hula hoop. Leave it out there. Grandma having trouble with Erica, and her traffic there and her six-pack of beer or however much, the drugs going in and out—that don’t fit in your hula hoop. Leave it over there. Let them deal with that mess. Don’t put it up here; don’t store it.”

  Annette had to go. She was only checking in. “You just keep doing what you’re doing,” she said as she walked out. “You’re doing good. Look at it. It’s all gonna fix and come back to you. Stay on the right path. Don’t move backwards. And don’t stray. I love you, too. Nine-one-one if you need me.”

  A FEW MINUTES later, Annette burst through the door again. One last thing: she wanted to tell everyone a story that she thought might help. They knew it already, but still … It was about Annette’s son, and about the possibility of second chances.

  From his earliest days, her boy wanted to ride in rodeos. That was what he wanted, and he couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. His mom was an addict, of course, and not in much of a position to challenge him. When her boy was thirteen, the age at which she had first attended an AA meeting, they went down to the funeral parlor together and selected his arrangements. It was what young rodeo boys were meant to do. Better to do it with no real urgency. Mom and son were best friends. Then, two years later, because of her drinking and drugs, he cut her loose. He told Annette he was done with her.

  Her boy’s bull-riding career took off, and, praise the Lord, the funeral arrangements never became necessary. Until that day two years ago. Her boy had ridden four bulls without a helmet, and without incident, at the rodeo. The fifth bull somehow convinced him to put on a helmet. In that round the boy lost his way on the bull and the bull struck him, with all its ferocious weight, in the head.

  Even with that helmet on, half the boy’s face slid off—peeled off from the underlying meat like chicken skin. Rushed to the hospital, the boy fell into a coma. Annette received the news and rushed down there. She hadn’t seen her boy in the longest time. She went anyway. The security guards ran her off, said she had nothing to do with this boy. She was only allowed to watch over him through a small window in a door. The boy’s father was on the other side of that door. The boy had tubes running into his head; the room was bustling with doctors and machines. There was nothing they could do. The boy’s father consented to pulling the plug, but it would still take hours for her boy to go.

  All Annette could do was pray: “If You are out there, if You are really out there, don’t do this to me. Let my baby walk back into my arms. Don’t take my baby from me. This can’t be real.” Annette left the hospital, and as the hours passed hope turned to anger, and anger to doubt: “If there was a higher power, if there was a God, He wasn’t gonna be no friend of mine because of what He did.”

  Then she got the phone call. Eight hours after they had pulled the plug, the boy had finally died. “They came and pronounced him dead,” Annette said. “They pulled the tubes out of his head, pulled all of this off of him. They covered him up, and was ready to take him off to the morgue. They were fixing to transfer him from this bed to this bed. They seen something move under the sheet.”

  They lifted the sheet, and parts of the boy were back alive. Slowly more and more of him woke up, and he was reborn.

  “And by the graces of God and the program we work on, and me following my program, my baby walked back into my arms for the first time December of last year,” Annette said.

  The story, already improbable on many levels, now grew more so. Not long ago, the boy had sent Annette a message—without knowing a thing about her protégé Amber or Amber’s hair color.

  “Mama, remember tools. You are a tool. Don’t preach it; tell your feelings. Our Father works through you and in you. One soul, one heart saved, will one day save many. Our Father in Heaven, bless and keep my mama. She hasn’t seen what You have shown me. Mama, your friend with red hair, she is safe with God. To believe is to be saved and have eternal life. Believe as my mother did the day I died.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, sending off her guests, Amber was relishing her new role as a bona fide big sister. A scrounger no more, she packed a bag full of eggs, toilet paper, turkey, and other things for Erica and Desireé, because who knew how they were living. The two of them faintly protested, but Amber would hear none of it. It felt good to be the giver.

  It was July 19. Tomorrow Amber and Tena were thinking of doing a small ceremony for the one-year anniversary of Mark Stroman’s death. For Amber every day remained a battle, but she felt surer now than in a long time—certainly surer than a year ago—that she would not turn out to be him.

  They all said their good-byes, not knowing when they would meet again. On the road home to Stephenville, Erica kept to herself mostly. A year earlier, she had been the solid one, relatively speaking. Now a piece of her felt deserted by a mother and sister who, in admitting to their problems at last, made her stand out as the little family drunk. But there was McDonald’s and the classes and the coming raise and Hamburger U. and that ladder she knew she could climb …

  Desireé was chatty all the way back, full of stories about how amazing she and Chance were going to be, trying to make connections between her life in Stephenville and the outside world she didn’t want to live in—because she loved Stephenville!—but which she so longed to understand.

  When Erica and Desireé got back to the apartment complex in Stephenville, it was in the middle of some kind of situation. Two police vehicles, lights spinning, stood near the entrance. The officers had gone in to ask questions. Some listless young men lingered to the side, winter hats pulled snugly over their heads in the sweltering July heat.

  The men were friends and neighbors of Erica and Desireé, some just from the apartments, some all the way from school days. They claimed they’d been robbed by one of Erica’s other cousins. The police didn’t show up until one guy threatened over the phone that he and his boys were going over to kill the culprits right now. This young man was beside himself with rage: the worst thing, he said, was that they stole his most personal shit—his porn, his court records, and, worst of all, his brother’s death certificate. What kind of a person steals a bro’s death certificate? Erica had gon
e inside to see what was happening. Desireé, still outside, whispered that this man and his buddies, in addition to being their close friends, were well-known Stephenville meth dealers.

  Desireé wished to drown out these men and this scene. She wanted to feel important. She knew she was better than this place and knew she would never leave it. She wanted to change the subject. Standing beside a police truck, lights still spinning, she began to talk of things as distant from this time and place as possible. She meandered from one excitable claim to the next, paying zero attention to the chaos around her.

  “I want to adopt a little girl from Africa!” she said at one point. And perhaps she would, and perhaps from her exclamation would, in time’s fullness, grow another immigrant story like Rais’s—another voyage to America, another brave and hard blossoming. Still, with the police still in the compound, with the meth dealers hovering, with Desireé’s six-pack-a-day cousin sorting through stuff inside, with one day to go before the one-year anniversary of her uncle’s execution for murder, it was strange to think of bringing a child from the deprivation that Desireé seemed to imagine far afield to the different deprivation that enwrapped her too fully for her to see.

  “They always need a better home in Africa,” Desireé said.

  Arrivals

  One morning that week, Rais lingered anxiously at the Dallas airport. For the first time since he landed on these shores thirteen years ago, his parents were visiting him. It was to be their first contact with American soil. His mother spoke almost no English, and his father was diabetic, and they had been scared of the coming trip. But it was a voyage that Rais needed them to make.

  The flight seemed to have arrived, but no sign of them. He paced. He sat. He wondered if something had befallen them. He asked a guard what would happen if they had grown unwell. How would they even reach him? They didn’t have a phone and didn’t know how to do things in America. Would anyone help them? It was better not to think about it.