Etched in Sand

by Regina Calcaterra

  Cookie laughs. “Next time, if you’re going to do it, do it right,” she says. “You cut on your wrists. Not your forearms.”

  A few days later, I’m startled from my thoughts of this conversation when a man wearing a black T-shirt, jeans, and work boots appears at the deli’s Employees Only kitchen door. I take in the vision of him—dark curls framing a tanned, handsome face and eyes shining pure as onyx—then I get back to peeling potatoes. I pause, waiting to see whether he’ll say anything.

  He stares.

  “Can I help you?”

  He examines me, taking in all my features. Finally, silently, he shakes his head. I look back down to peel the potatoes; when I move my eyes to see if he’s still there . . . he’s gone. Although I don’t recall ever meeting him, something about his eyes is eerily familiar. I can’t shake the certainty that I’ve seen them somewhere before.

  “HIS NAME IS Paul Accerbi.” The flicking sound of Cookie’s lighter collides with the ding of the dishes I’m setting on the table for dinner. “He comes waltzing in, digging through his wallet, then looks up at me—a deer in friggin’ headlights.”

  I stop setting the table to stare at her.

  “God, what I wouldn’t give to capture the look on his face when he saw me. ‘Your daughter’s in the back,’ I tell him. Do you know how long I waited to deliver that line?” She takes a drag of her cigarette. “Well, actually, I’ll tell you how long: eleven looong years.” She laughs, a cackle then a hack. “The look on the son of a bitch’s face, I thought he was gonna shit a bagel.”

  I’ve just seen this man for the first time five hours ago and already I’m planning how I’d like to decorate my bedroom in his home. Dad, I’d ask him, will you hang a shelf where I can place all my Jesus figurines? He’d install blinds on my bedroom windows and check their locks every night at dark. Then he’d tuck me in, pushing the edge of my comforter between the mattress and box spring to make sure I’m safe and secure.

  “See that?” Cookie says. “He took one look at your sore ass and left you again. Good thing you have me to care about you.”

  But nothing she says about my father can bring me down from what I’ve just learned about him: that he exists. There’s someone else in the world with me . . . I’m not alone anymore. I’ve always wondered, Who is this man? Is he even alive? He’s not just alive, he’s handsome . . . and looks normal.

  My universe has shifted.

  Paul Accerbi. I had heard those words, but they have new meaning now. In our first apartment in Saint James, Cookie would tie me to the radiator and invoke his name as she beat me. “Paul Accerbi!” she’d scream, yanking my hair to pound my head on the floor or whipping my back with a belt. “He hurt me the MOST,” she’d wail. “So YOU will hurt the most!” I knew this from the first night that I met her when I was four, and she never let me forget it.

  Cookie shared her stories of who each of our separate fathers were. Some we knew to be true; when she talked about Rosie’s dad and mine, her stories never changed about Vito and Paul. But the details always got blurred with the identity of the fathers of my other siblings—she claimed they ranged from famous pop singers from her go-go dancer days to gas station attendants she met on the rebound. What was shocking for me to learn about Paul is that he lived close enough that stopping in the deli for lunch could have been part of his normal routine.

  After Cookie’s gone out for a drink, I grab the Suffolk County phone book; my stomach is doing flips as I near the first page of A. I scan the listings . . . until I reach the only name that matches his:

  Accerbi, Paul & Joan

  My father and what appears to be his wife live in Riverhead, which, if I’m reading the phone book’s map correctly, is probably a forty-minute drive east of our house. I flip back to the A’s and close the cover, staring at the no-nonsense yellow and the black text. Of everything I’ve ever read, who could have known that the book that would give me all the hope and answers I’ve prayed for would be the White Pages.

  IN OCTOBER OF my seventh-grade year, Cookie is arrested again for driving drunk, with no registration and a suspended license. When they run her name through their records they discover she has outstanding warrants for bouncing checks all over Suffolk County. “How much money do you think Mom has bounced checks for?” Norm asks me.

  I shrug. “Maybe a couple hundred,” I tell him, even though it’s more like thousands.

  The cops come to our door, reporting Cookie’s trying to get out of jail by sobbing that her kids are alone and in need of their mother. It takes Cherie and Camille some very practiced skill to answer all their questions. “Have you looked after your siblings for days at a time before?”

  “Not really,” Cherie says. “But we babysit them a lot.”

  The cops ask Rosie and Norm to come chat. “Do your big sisters take good care of you?”

  The two of them nod enthusiastically. Within a couple minutes we’ve convinced the cops that we’ll be fine until Cookie makes bail. But just as they pull out of the deli parking lot, Hank comes knocking. “When your mother gets back, tell her she has a week to get out of here,” he says. The next few days, I work morning, noon, and night at the deli to earn as much cash as I can. Hank drops a couple jars of peanut butter and jelly in a bag along with two loaves of bread. “That should last you kids awhile,” he says. “Right?”

  I nod. “Thanks, Hank.”

  That night, a cop car drops Cookie out front, and they set a court date for later in October.

  We’ve always avoided apartment complexes because their management companies conduct background checks on the renters, but this time it’s the only thing Cookie can find that will accept a welfare voucher.

  She’s been paranoid about the “pigs” ever since she left jail, so we all stay shuttered inside with the shades drawn tight and all the lights off. Cookie refuses to register us for school in case the authorities would use us to track her down. The first two weeks, she sends Cherie or Camille out every other day for cigarettes and food, until they deflate me with a joint announcement that they’ve decided to move back in with Kathy’s family permanently.

  Norm, Rosie, and I are stuck—yet again—with Cookie in a cold, unfurnished apartment. It’s my job to get her cigarettes and food with our food stamps, but when I meet a friend my age down the hall, whose parents have an apartment that’s completely furnished, I catch a beating for taking the risk to draw attention to us. My embarrassment about the bruises makes me half-relieved when there’s a knock at our front door at the end of our first month. “Shit, the pigs!” Cookie hisses in the dark. “Regina, you answer it!”

  “We know you’re in there!”

  Calmly, I loosen the chain on the door to find two men in button-down shirts standing in front of me.

  “We know she’s in here,” one of them says, wearing a shirt with the complex’s water fountain logo embroidered on the pocket.

  “She’s not,” I answer, “and I’m not allowed to let you in when my mom’s not home.”

  “Well, she better get here fast because the police are on their way.”

  When I latch the door, Cookie lights a panicked cigarette. “What the hell am I gonna do now? They must’ve found out about my record and reported my whereabouts to the police . . . the motherfuckers.”

  “Norm, Rosie,” I tell them, “get all your clothes. Towels and blankets, too.”

  Cookie takes a load of our luggage out to the car. “I skipped my hearing and lost the bail money,” she confesses, as though we’re suddenly friends. “They probably have another warrant out for my arrest.”

  “Then let’s hurry up and get out of here,” I answer.

  She rolls out of the complex’s parking lot, chanting this rhyme:

  We were here, but not to stay.

  We didn’t like it anyway.

  WHEN THE LEAVES start changing, it looks as though I may spend my twelfth birthday the same way I spent my eleventh: We live in the car while Cookie sits in bars.
If she finds a man with enough class (or a wife) who will take her to a hotel for the night, she asks him to get us a room right next to theirs. I take baths so long I nearly fall asleep in the tub while Norm and Rosie stretch wide on the bed, watching TV like little kings. We live it up on these nights, knowing that in hours we’ll be back in the car, sleeping behind a nondescript supermarket or in the parking lot of the Smith Haven Mall.

  In November, Cookie meets Garcia, a compact, kind-faced farmworker who frequents the pub that’s just down from the mall. When she tells him her kids are living in her car, he offers for Norm, Rosie, and me to sleep in an empty farm trailer all winter, if we’re willing to muck out the horse stables every morning. “He said there’s no heat in the trailer,” I tell the kids, “but it’s better than living in a parking lot all winter.”

  In the hours of the morning when most kids are still slumbering before their parents wake them up, we’re rising from a shivering, teeth-chattering night to wash our faces using the hose inside the barn and a bucket of water with soap. Shortly after we’ve supplied the horses with water and hay is the best part of the morning: that’s when the workers arrive. They bring us breakfast of warm rolls from a nearby bakery or Hostess cakes, and sometimes they walk us to the pub for the soup and sandwich lunch special . . . but we always hurry to exit before Cookie parks herself at the bar for the day.

  As far as caretakers go, I’m partial to Garcia, who looks out for us so well I don’t bother to wonder why he would never date Cookie.

  He promises that after the horses get used to us, he’ll give us riding lessons. A few days in a row he teaches me to practice saddling up Dixie, a sweet nutmeg mare. After half a dozen lessons in the saddle, Norman, Rosie, and I take turns trotting her around as if she were our own, until one afternoon when both Rosie and the horse find themselves surprised. Apparently Dixie’s being sought after by an overly enthusiastic stud, causing all the farmworkers to crowd around in terror. One runs to rescue Rosie from the reins, while the two horses go on to give us all a lesson in horse mating so thorough I’m tempted to write in to National Geographic.

  Garcia informs us that Cookie’s been living with a guy from the pub, so for Thanksgiving, the workers call Salvation Army to bring us a warm dinner. When the food arrives, the kids and I slip socks poked with holes over our fingers and open the Styrofoam containers heaped with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce. We scurry to take seats around our trailer’s folding table. “Let’s say grace,” I tell them. We bow our heads as I lead:

  Bless us O Lord,

  And these Thy gifts

  Which we are about to receive from Thy bounty

  Through Christ, our Lord.

  Amen.

  When my sisters first taught me this prayer, they gave me permission to bless myself with the sign of the cross, even though none of us are sure whether I was ever baptized. I watch as Rosie and Norman dig into their dinners, reminding them to chew slowly. After dinner we eat the pumpkin pie the Salvation Army brought us, then we lounge on the floor to play board games with our stomachs so full we can barely move. “Does your belly hurt?” I ask Rosie.

  “No,” she answers. “It feels delicious.”

  As the weather continues to chill down, the workers begin to arrive earlier, allowing us to sleep in and stay out of the cold. The three of us begin to spend our days hanging out at the mall, watching shoppers’ carts fill up with gifts as little kids climb onto Santa’s lap. “Do you think Santa will ever bring us presents?” Rosie asks me.

  “One day, sweetheart. When we stop moving around and we’re finally home for good.”

  It’s almost Christmas when Cookie shows up again. She says welfare has a room for us in the Los Biandos shelter in Patchogue. There’s no mention of my going back to school, and part of me would prefer to stay on the farm with the workers who look out for us, but at the shelter we’ll get heat and three meals a day, plus running water in the shared bathroom.

  I find my preferred spot is the shelter’s laundry room, where it’s warm and easy to strike up conversations with our neighbors. That’s where I finally meet a new friend. Just like me, Karen is twelve, and she loves to read like I do. We hang out, paging through magazines from the shelter’s shelves; or often Karen’s family invites Rosie, Norman, and me to sit with them at dinner in the shelter’s dining hall. I love this, because her mother is married, and her stepdad teaches us new words when we play hangman and Scrabble after we help with dinner cleanup.

  Karen’s stepdad sits in one of the wooden-frame chairs in the shelter’s TV room, urging the baby as she practices walking or talking with Karen and me about what’s happening in the news. He’s the only man I can think of who has ever treated me like an adult, and he’s one of the only decent dads at the shelter.

  One day when the laundry room is almost empty, Karen tells me her stepdad’s been asking her where I get all my bruises and cuts.

  “It’s from my brother, tell him,” I reply. “You know boys, they love to wrestle.”

  Then the man who runs the shelter starts watching me in the laundry room. When I’m in there alone, in the corner of my eye I watch him take a seat next to me.

  “Regina,” he says. “Can you tell me where your mother spends her time?”

  “Around,” I answer. “You see her sometimes, but usually she just sleeps a lot.” I pretend to concentrate on my magazine, an issue of TV Guide I’ve read a dozen times, aware that he knows my mother hangs around the shelter long enough to make herself appear present before she takes off for days to go hopping between bars and beds.

  “I need you to tell me where the marks on your body come from.”

  I freeze.

  “Your family’s room is right next to the administration office, and some of the staff have reported hearing shouting, or often the TV’s on full blast.” When she is around to beat us, the loud TV is Cookie’s number one tactic.

  “It’s my brother,” I insist. “You’ve seen how he plays.”

  “Regina.”

  I put down my magazine with a huff.

  “If you don’t tell me the truth, I can’t let you eat at mealtime.”

  “It’s my brother,” I tell him. “If I were getting beat, don’t you think you’d hear it?”

  I’d survived worse than not eating for a few days, and not telling and going hungry was better than the risk of telling and getting separated.

  At Christmas, the shelter workers invite us kids to help them decorate a Christmas tree. Rosie, now six, gently takes my hand and looks on with a shy smile when Santa arrives carrying a sack on his shoulder. The shelter director encouraged me to make a wish list, so I asked for new Mad Libs game pads and Highlights magazines to share with Rosie and Norm. As the gifts are being handed out, he also tells me to write a list of books appropriate for seventh grade, and he’ll sign them out of the library for me. I jot down a dozen Landmark history books to read to Rosie, and a couple Judy Blumes. I figure, why not load up? You don’t have to pay at the library.

  Then a few months later, in March of 1979, Cookie returns to the shelter and announces that she’s registered us back in school and rented the top unit in a duplex in Ronkonkoma. She drops us there and takes off immediately, which suits Rosie, Norm, and me fine: After having lived in the shelter for a few months, the three of us are so used to having friends around that every day after school we invite the neighborhood kids to our house. But the fun’s over one afternoon when Cookie decides to come home, taking me by the hair and dragging me into her bedroom. Our friends tear down the stairs and outside as Cookie grabs a belt then rips off my shirt. She lashes my back, over and over. I try for the door but end up huddled in the corner, and as she takes a break to regain her grip on the belt, I start fighting back. She fights for her breath as she hurls the belt and screams, “The more you fight it, you skinny little whore, the longer it’s going to take! You have boys over, you stupid slut? This is for your own good. You want to end up pregnant
? Who’s gonna take care of your baby? Huh?” she demands. “Me?”

  When she’s finished, she drags me to my room by my arm and tosses me inside. Quickly I put on a different shirt and shimmy down the back of the house, running out of the yard, dodging the commotion on the back porch as the neighbors point her to where I’ve gone. All one-hundred-eighty pounds of Cookie come heaving after me, and again she takes me by my hair and tugs me back to the house.

  “Take off your jeans and your top,” she says.

  I glare at her.

  “Take off your fucking clothes, you whore. Rosie, Norman,” she says, “I want you to see what happens when you try to run away.” I make eye contact with Rosie, who’s looking on in fear as Cookie spins me so that my back’s facing her. I stiffen, hearing her arm rise high in the air. She whips me . . . and whips me . . . and whips me some more. I squeeze my eyes shut and bite my lip and then finally cry out in pain as my entire body feels like it’s swollen and red. Then she ties my hands together. She binds my ankles, and wraps my wrists around the closet rod. Once I’m hanging helpless inside the closet, she slams the door shut. I kick the door and scream, not able to control myself from giving her such satisfaction. The afternoon light streaming under the closet door begins to disappear swiftly, and the sensation is as though I’m being buried alive—chained up and shoved into a small space, the way she’d do when I was little. When my voice is gone and I’m certain my wrists must be sprained, I have no choice but to give up fighting. I struggle to keep my mind from panicking as the numerous incidents of being tied or chained up caused my intense claustrophobia. I fight off a panic attack by counting, then praying for any image that could possibly slow my pounding heart.

  Then, I’m there: walking on the beach with my sisters and the kids, writing our names in the sand, floating in the water, and lifting up rocks to discover clams for dinner. I can taste the onion grass, feel the sway of the beach weeds bending against my knees in the breeze as we head out to swim on the floating dock.