I walk through the halls in my new clothes with my head up, clasping my new spiral notebooks against my chest, and a wake of whispers rises up behind me as I pass. I think they are signs of admiration. But as the day wears on, nobody speaks to me but my one friend Carmen, the only girl who'd taken me in after I was dumped. People I say hi to shoot me a sickly smile and walk quickly past. At my locker at the end of the day, Missy Morrison saunters up to me and asks point-blank, “Were you, like, in a foster home this summer?”
My face flushes and I look into my locker to hide a surge of tears. “No,” I say, cool and casual. “Uhh! Where'd you hear that?”
“Well, it's like everybody knows.”
Everybody did know. They all knew I was in a group home for bad kids. They all knew I'd been a green-haired freak in seventh grade. They all knew I made stuff up about Mom and lost my friends in eighth grade. And they all knew how stupid I was for failing algebra, French, and even the easiest class of all last year: Health.
ONE DAY IN LATE SEPTEMBER Mom asked me if I had a friend I could spend the night with. She was planning an overnight trail ride with Danny down at the Horseman's Camp and it happened to be on the same night that Dad was going out of town for a swap meet. They didn't want to leave me at home all alone and Mom thought I might like to spend the night with Carmen.
“You've grown up a lot, Sis, I think we can trust you now.”
That delicious night of freedom, Carmen and I stayed up way past midnight. We jumped on her bed and collapsed into a massive pile of girly clothes we'd spent hours trying on. We ran barefoot across the warm pavement of the road during a thunderstorm, the steamy air smelling faintly of warm breath. We bought pizza subs from the Tarlton Tasty Freeze and fell asleep spooning each other in her bed, bursting out from under the covers with giggles, whispering, “Do you think Martin Roberts from shop class is cute? Do you think Bruce Delorne likes me? Do you think Mr. Summers is gay?”
FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS, Mom had been fused to me. We had shared one long symbiotic breath. And when I did get out, Dad would drag me back like a rabid junkyard dog, tearing out of the garage after any boy from school that drove down our road to stop and say hello to me. In all those years of horse shows and trail rides, swimming in the pool, porch nights with Stink Pup and Ebony or snuggling with my P. J., I didn't have as much fun as the night I spent at Carmen's. And it wasn't just because I was away from home. It was because I now had Mom and Dad's permission and trust to stay out. It was because, deep down, I had a hunch they knew I did the right thing in God's eyes by turning them in. I had finally earned their respect. And I was thrilled.
THE NEXT MORNING, when I pulled from the wooded tunnel that encased our road, I saw before me a deserted smoldering football field of twisted metal, dusted with a thick layer of soot like a blackened catfish, where our six-bedroom double-wide mansion used to sprawl.
I took my foot off of the accelerator and let the wagon ease to a crawl. My brain was racing, “Oh. My. GOD. I left the curling iron on and burned the house down!”
I was going to be in soo much trouble. OH MY GOD! What if everybody was inside? Dead. Panic hit and I punched the gas, hauling the next hundred yards to the house. When I slammed into the gravel pit of our drive, Mom popped her head out of the log cabin.
“Oh, Mom, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.” I ran out of the car. “Did I leave it on? Did I do it?”
“Did you do what, Julie?”
“The curling iron, Mom, did I leave the curling iron on and burn the house down?”
“Jesus, Julie, it was lightning. Your dad came home early this morning and it was just, gone, it'd already happened. There was nothing anybody could do about it.”
Mom said that the fire inspector was already there by the time Dad came home; the neighbors had called the sheriff when they noticed billowy smoke roll over the treetops. The fire inspector cited our TV antenna as the culprit. It had been struck by lightning, which traveled down the wiring, and since we had a TV in every room, it caught all the walls on fire instantaneously, in one initial poof, causing an explosion that ignited the house in a torrent of roaring flames.
There is no way any of us, had we been in the house at the time, would have survived.
“We'd a never got out,” Mom said. “Just praise God we're all okay.”
I looked at the still-smoldering lot of blackened, warped aluminum. Adrenaline was coursing through me, the way it did after a twister drill at school. The danger was over, we all survived, and even though we lost our house, everything was going to be okay. And I was off the hook.
I began walking along the edges of the black cinder blocks the trailer was built on. One by one things I'd never see again flashed into my mind. My shoes, oh, those awesome light blue ones I loved so much, and then, my pink cashmere coat and… oh my God, where's P. J.? Where's P. J.? A sick panic turned my stomach.
I raced back up the walkway, shouting, “Mom! Where's P. J., where's my P. J., I can't find P. J.!”
“Julie.” Mom faltered. “Look. She was in the house when it burned. Now just let it go. Dan tried to get her out last night but you know how she goes under the bed when it thunders.”
“Dad tried to get her out last night? I thought he was at the swap meet.”
“Jesus, I mean before he left the house, he tried to get her out of the house before he left, you know, to put her out in the pen. Now will you stop giving me a hard time?”
No, no, I can't take losing my P. J. You can take my coat and those shoes, the York remote control stereo with the detachable speakers, you can take my porcelain doll collection and all my books, even my baby pictures, but ohh, P. J., you must have been so scared, so alone. No, you just can't take my P. J., God, why? Why, God?
This is what I ask of God, to help me rise above and look down on below. To see how tragic this has been, how there was no reason that P. J. had to burn up like she did, how God must have had a greater plan in mind, and that I, as the small weak human I am, just can't see it yet. I say a prayer for my lost dog, for Mom and Dad, and to please, God, please let me see the ways that you have divinely woven for my life so I can understand why you did this to me. Please, God, show me the light.
DAD IS IN THE CAMPER, sitting on the top bunk in his cutoff jean shorts. He's got his head hung low and a few tears have squeaked out of his eyes, leaving skinny streaks in the dirt on his face. I climb up into the hallway of the camper and sit silently at his feet.
He lifts his head and I stand to hug him. He needs me, my dad. And I am strong. I can get our family through this. He sobs then, and this gives me permission to cry with him. He is talking in distant whispers: Why did it have to happen, how come it had to happen? When Dad is small, I am big and have all the answers.
“God had a greater plan in store for us, Dad, and now you and Mom can do the things you always wanted, now you guys can afford to get divorced.” And that is what I believed from that point out. That fire was a godsend. P. J. was sacrificed so Mom and Dad could get the money they needed to be free from each other; free from the past and everything they did to each other. And if we needed to lose all our clothes, our photos, all our childhood things, if this is what needed to happen, then God must have said it was to be so. I felt honored that I could see this loss in such a noble way. I clung to this thought tighter than my white Sunday school Bible, the edges of its pages sprayed luminous with gold leaf.
IT WAS A HUNDRED BUCKS. That was money my family could use, I could be a hero. I would be the one who saved us from starving until the insurance check came.
In the first days after the house burned down, Mom and Danny stayed with a man up the road she knew from trail rides, Dad hung out with his junkyard buddies in Columbus, and I got to stay wherever I could. We didn't really have a home base and it was easier just to split up. The next day I ran into some kids I knew from Lancaster, where I worked at Rax. By now everybody in the Tri-County area had heard my house burned down. But the advantage to being in Lancast
er was that nobody there knew I'd been a foster kid. The boys were off for the drag races in Columbus, I was off work, and it all sounded like a good way to use up an otherwise empty day. I climbed into the back of their primered Firebird and they sped off down the highway.
We pulled into Columbus Motor Speedway and found the only patch of grass still available to park, a thin strip that ran along a makeshift stage where girls were lining up next to one another. That's weird; so many girls all together at a racetrack. I unfolded from out of the backseat and as my head shot up to my full height, I saw a sea of men bunched up around the front of the stage. And they saw me.
“Heyyyy, pretty lady, we can't wait to see youu— Yeeeehaaaa!”
It was a wet T-shirt contest and the announcer on the stage was spitting into the crackling mike. A hundred dollars was going to one of these six lucky ladies and it would be decided by the response from the men.
“And just in time—being driven right up to the stage—let's hear it, gentlemen, for our seventh pretty girlllll.”
Pretty girl. No one ever called me that before. And the men erupted in hoots and hollers. I'd never heard anything like it. An entire population of men were hooting like bonobos at me.
I looked into the sea of faces. Some were wearing overalls. Others were just homely, their limp hair sticking out from under CAT ballcaps. Still others had whipped their hats off and were waving them in the air. They seemed to ache for me, leaning forward, hands pleading, as if to say: Please join the other girls up there and give an old man a little joy in his life, will ya?
It was money my family could use. Nobody knew I was here. The men wanted me to win. Maybe I did have a shot. Why not try to win the cash and turn it over to Dad? I envisioned me giving my parents a crisp hundred-dollar bill and Dad beaming with tears of joy. All I do is let them pour water down my front.
I stepped toward the stage. The men roared. I had only the same stuff on from the night before, and there I was, standing at the end of the lineup, blanking out the outside world, just like I'd done all those years in exam rooms. But this time, a ribbon of thought played over and over. This hundred dollars is for Dad. They touch the tip of the pitcher to my chest. This hundred is going to bring us together in love. They pour. The girl next to me peels off her top and the crowd goes wild. As a family. I do the same. This hundred dollars is going to get Danny some school clothes so the kids don't make fun of him. She takes her shorts off. It's up to me to save my family. I can't be selfish. And down my jeans slipped, until I stepped right out of them. The men surged below the rim of the stage, their blurry tattooed arms waving like tentacles. I gulped some air. I'd been holding my breath the whole time.
As cheering or boos weeded the girls out one by one, it came down to two of us, Miss Blond-banged longhair, and me: innocent country girl. No makeup, plain-Jane clean, long, smooth colt legs that curved up to my thigh-high lacy purple Value City panties, my svelte look obtained from cans of food supplements and an inability to gain weight.
With a half-grin, Miss I've-definitely-done-this-before decided to up the ante and turned right around to show her bottom to the crowd, wiggle it for their frothy approval, bend all the way over and peel, ever so slowly, her own underwear down off her backside, like an elevator descending, right down past the backs of her knees, down over her calves, right down till they looped around her ankles like a silky rope.
The throng of guys just about whipped themselves into a pulsating frenzy and she jutted her head up, still hanging down around her ankles, to smile at me in a way that said, “Uh-huh. You're beat.”
Guys were throwing off their hats, slapping each other, wiping their tears. I burst into my own genuine grin. My jig was up. I wanted the money so bad, sooo bad I could taste it, but I couldn't bring myself to do what she did. I leaned over and picked up my clothes, flipping them over me zigzag, and made my way daintily down the rickety stage steps.
LATER THAT DAY I saw my dad's junkyard buddy, Big Eddie. The second he spotted me, his face lit up. “Purple panties, purple panties.” My eyes must have registered horror because he narrowed his to slits and said as mean as any Westside hood, “Don't believe me? Go find your dad. He snapped the Polaroids. “
DANNY AND I RAN AROUND with greentinged sweaters coating our teeth and peed in the yard. We ate buckets of Halloween candy before bed, and in the mornings we took it to school stuffed in our pockets to take the place of cafeteria lunch. Butterfingers for breakfast, Snickers at noon, Smarties for snacks, and giant mixing bowls with a half-box of Lucky Charms and milk for dinner. We didn't even use the sugar bowl anymore. We just poured an inch-thick layer of white over our cereal straight from the five-pound bag.
Before Mom and Dad left, we all shacked up in a tiny pull-behind camper that a man up the road had loaned us. It was set up on cinderblocks and plunked out on the grass by the charred remains of the old homestead. The teeny dinette we squeezed around for dinner converted into a bed for Danny and me by dropping the table into the center hole and sticking the stained upholstered cushions on the plywood bench seats. Mom and Dad had the foam mattress on the bunk, separated from us only by the sink and two feet of countertop. We turned the five-gallon worm bucket into a toilet and set it out to the side of the garage because the camper didn't even have a commode.
And there we sat, waiting on the insurance money. Before we could get it, we had to try to remember every last thing that'd been stuffed into our six-bedroomed lair: Mom's hundreds of shoes, the back room piled almost to the ceiling with junk we'd bought but never used, our closets bulging with clothes, rooms cluttered with toys and furniture, heaped with Matchbox car collections and collectible china dolls.
We lined notebook pages full of items scribbled in our child's writing, and sometimes we would be in school or in town and spot something else we'd owned but had forgotten all about. The memories of our lost belongings haunted me for years, triggered by something as small as a polka-dot top seen on a girl that I hadn't remembered I'd owned before the fire. We turned in our lists, along with the price and current value as best our young, predepreciation minds could muster, and were swept up in the enthusiasm over what new things we were going to get with the money.
Mom made endless lists of things to buy. Then organized her lists into further lists, trying to keep it all straight. We kept asking, “When's the check gonna come? When's the check gonna come?” But it kept inching closer and closer to cold, to November, to heavy skies, wet crimson leaves and daylight savings turning it dark by five o'clock. We had no money for anything, and Danny and I were still wearing the same clothes we had on the day the house burned down. Luckily for Danny, Mom had packed a small wardrobe for the two of them the night they went away. Me, I just had my original fire clothes and some polyester high-waters the Rax Roast Beef team gave me so I could still work a few days after school.
We knew the check had come the day we got off the school bus and there was a newly delivered washer and dryer sitting out by the well, still in their cardboard boxes because there was no house to hook them up in. Across the road two baby colts nuzzled from grain buckets, and a new four-horse trailer sat attached to a just-bought crew-cab truck, with dual wheels on the back. The next day, a gleaming white satellite dish loomed over our little camper. Mom doled out of her purse a hundred dollars each for me and Danny to spend at Value City. We felt rich.
Then she was gone.
Mom took off for Mexico with the man who loaned us the camper, the man from up the road—Barbwire Bob—a wiry high strung cowboy who used to be a horse showman. Dad stayed with us for a while, but by November, he had moved into a garage in Stoutsville and hung in its only window a big black POW-MIA flag that said, “Kill 'em all, Let God sort 'em out.”
We couldn't go with Dad, because somebody had to stay and look after the horses, especially Mom's new colts that stood helpless in the tiny paddock across the road.
Dad took with him his own new crew-cab dually truck and the washer and dryer. Th
e only thing that stayed behind with Danny and me and our five-gallon bucket and mixing bowls of cereal was the steady looming watch of a giant satellite dish. Too bad we didn't have a TV.
WE MADE IT THROUGH THOSE DAYS AND NIGHTS with the grace of two latchkey kids who were determined to keep our style and image intact—if only so the kids at school wouldn't know about us. We were on our own, and I was a mom for real now with Danny. Our isolated spot on the bus route made us the first ones on at six a.m. and the last ones off at night. We counted on the bus driver taking the same route every day, hoping that there would be no one to look out the windows as the bus turned around in our drive. We hid behind false confidence and presented ourselves to the world as first-class snobby-as-could-pull-off-in-present-circumstances kids. God, we hoped nobody called Children's Services.
MOM AND BARBWIRE BOB CAME BACK before Christmas and moved a used single-wide trailer over the black scorched earth where our double-wide used to sit. I worked two jobs, went to school, and stayed away as much as possible. Nobody came to my high school graduation; not Mom, not Dad, not Danny. Two months later, Mom loaded me up in the station wagon and dropped me off in the Kroger's parking lot.
All that summer, she'd been talking on the phone to an older man who wanted to marry me. An older man in the Army, with a harelip and a white Firebird, complete with a hood-size sticker of that great winged bird on the front of the car. And now he was calling every week, talking to Mom about how he could get me till death do us part.
“Julie, look, do you think anybody is going to want to marry a sick thing like you? This man is in the Army, he's got a good job, let him take care of you!”
Mom reasoned that if she set me loose in a parking lot with just a paper bag full of clothes to my name, I would be so scared that I'd call him to come get me.
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood Page 14