Etched in Sand

by Regina Calcaterra

  IN THE MORNING Norman comes in to cut me loose, and I direct him as he gets Rosie ready for school. “You two cannot miss the bus,” I tell him. “You have to eat today, and I can’t go to school like this.” Not only are my wrists scarred, but my image is, too. I work my stomach into knots wondering what I can possibly say to my friends after they witnessed how my mother treats me.

  Days later I’ve got bigger problems when the landlord opens the door and marches right past me, carrying our belongings out to the lawn.

  “But it’s hardly even spring yet!” I tell him. “You’re expecting us to sleep out in the cold?”

  “I’ve let you stay here three months,” he says, “which is two months more than your mother’s paid for.”

  I turn to the kids, trying to keep my cool for their sake. “You stay here with all our stuff. I’m going to call Cherie. I’ll be right back.” At the convenience store up the road, I beg the clerk for a dime to call Cherie.

  She shows up in her boyfriend’s car to get us and sets us up to sleep at Kathy’s house for the night. I dread her call to Cookie . . . who has no choice but to turn up the next morning with some BS story to try to rectify herself in front of Kathy’s mother. “Oh, just wait until they hear from my lawyer. I’m gonna sue their shorts off!” she says. We spend the summer and fall living out of cars, bars, and hotels, and my thirteenth birthday is just like my twelfth . . . which was just like my eleventh. Right before Christmas, Cookie finds us a place in Smithtown with a landlord who likes to pay her visits late at night in lieu of accepting rent.

  But it’s all going as smoothly as I can hope when I’m able to register for eighth grade in the middle of the year, not revealing that I never finished seventh. Also, Camille moves back in when I persuade her during another pay phone call. “Smithtown’s close to Hauppauge!” I tell her. “You’d be close to all your friends!” She moves back in, and we stay through the spring . . . but at the beginning of summer, the landlord’s wife comes knocking when she finds out how the rent is being paid.

  And then, before I ever see my eighth grade diploma . . .

  We’re gone.

  8

  Empty Emancipation

  November 1980 to Summer 1984

  I SHAKE THE cramp from my hand and look at Ms. Davis over the thick affidavit on Addie’s table. “Emancipation,” I ask her and Addie, “means that I will never have to answer to Cookie again . . . right?”

  Addie glances at Ms. Davis, who says, “That’s exactly what emancipation means, Regina.”

  In exhaustion, I want to rest my head on this document. Completing this affidavit will change everything, but based on every event we’ve experienced in the foster system up to now, we can never predict whether the change will be better or worse.

  The story of how we grew up is finally revealed to the authorities. Inside Addie’s kitchen on that Sunday in November, four days after my mother bruised me with her kicks and bloodied me with broken glass, Ms. Davis primes us to sign the affidavit by explaining that nobody can access a report where child abuse is involved, especially not the accused. She also assures us our statements will only be used to proceed with my gaining freedom from Cookie.

  “And—you swear, the county is going to do everything it can to make sure Cookie can never get the kids again?” I turn to Camille, making sure Ms. Davis knows the hardness of this next statement is all for her: “Because I would suffer these black-and-blue marks all over again—I would spend the rest of my life sleeping alone behind a grocery store to hide from Cookie—if it meant I’d never have to see my little sister’s and brother’s faces in terror inside a social services car again.”

  “I understand,” Ms. Davis says.

  “Well then, promise: You and everyone you work with will fight for the kids’ safety from the second I put my pen to this page.”

  “Regina, I promise.”

  I look at Cherie and Camille. “I’m ready.”

  I put the ballpoint pen to the line reading Signature and in loopy, feminine strokes, sign:

  Regina M. Calcaterra

  Then I flip the pen toward Camille. “You’re up.”

  She gently slides it from my grip and, with the confidence of a maestro, scrawls her name beneath mine, and then Cherie follows her lead before she heads back home to her young family.

  “Now that you both determined you won’t return to your mother’s care,” Ms. Davis says, looking at Camille and me, “you need to begin planning how you’ll live on your own as soon as you turn eighteen. The state only covers your foster care costs until then, unless you go to college.”

  “College?” I asked.

  “Granted, that comes with its own challenges—in fact, I have yet to see a foster kid go to college.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, think about it: It’s tough to hold down a job and make rent when you’re working hard to study. In any case, we’ll start teaching you how to live independently. Then, hopefully, one day you can make it on your own.” I glance at Camille, who’s giving Ms. Davis a look of daggers.

  After she leaves, Addie stands aside to let Camille and me pass from the kitchen. “Will you be joining us for dinner?” she says.

  “No thanks,” we call behind us. We close ourselves in Camille’s bedroom, and I stare up at her ceiling. “I don’t know how to feel,” I confess.

  She collapses with her head next to mine on the pillow. “Me neither.”

  Then as if on cue, we turn to each other and burst out laughing. We laugh so hard we begin to hyperventilate in tears until we roll off the bed, making two bony thuds on Addie’s floor. Eventually, I’m able to compose myself enough to mock our three full days of social workers and legal talk. “Congratulations!” I declare. “Now that you’ve just dumped your mother, you’ll be homeless again at eighteen . . . if you survive until then!”

  Camille wipes her tears and folds her arms across her bust as Ms. Davis is apt to do. “Listen, girls,” she says with fake empathy, “really, you don’t stand an icicle’s chance in hell. Just try not to end up a drug addict, an alcoholic, pregnant, a prostitute, or in jail.”

  “Like your mother!” I wail.

  That night Camille kisses me on the cheek and smooths my hair behind my ear. “What are you thinking about?”

  I sigh. “Rosie and Norm. Tomorrow after school I’m going to ask Addie if we can call them.”

  “I’m worried about them, too . . . but this is your day,” Camille says. “Do you think our birthday girl is going to get her wish?”

  I smile. All weekend we’d been trying to stay out of the way at our temporary foster home while also racing against Ms. Davis’s deadline to get the affidavit completed and signed on time . . . but through all the chaos, my sister remembered that today I turned fourteen. Tucking my hands behind my head, I lie back on my pillow. “I think I just did.”

  MONDAY’S SCHOOL BUS ride is still buzzing from last week’s presidential election with Ronald Reagan defeating President Jimmy Carter. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan famously asked Carter in their final debate, a week before the election. I’m better off than I was four days ago, I figure.

  In the halls of the high school I keep my hair in my face and my head down, hoping that if I don’t meet the gaze of my peers, then they can’t see me, either. I spend my time in class doodling je t’aime and mia bambina amore on the covers of my notebooks.

  I begin to eat more, and within a week at the Petermans’, my clothes start to fit differently. Because I’m a foster kid I get free lunch at school, then dinner every night with Camille, Danny, and the family. The more I eat, the more I want to eat—“Putting some meat on those bones for the winter!” Pete says—but Addie makes it clear that her home is no place for me to make up for all the meals I’ve missed in the last fourteen years. She’s constantly on a diet, so eating between meals is discouraged for all of us . . . and I catch myself craving the Ho Hos and Twinkies I’d make a meal out of w
hen we were living on our own. Camille, too, is obviously strained by all the restrictions—suddenly our entire lives are structured around the Petermans’ meal schedule, TV-viewing schedule, homework, and curfews. At night, whispering in her bedroom, Camille begins to prepare me: Even though the Petermans have invited us both to stay permanently, she doesn’t want to live in a way that’s so restricted. She tells me she’ll stay with me through the holidays, but by spring she wants to find another situation.

  “Spring,” I say. “Great. You’re going to leave me just when we’re about to go to court in April to make my emancipation official.”

  “Regina, I’m seventeen,” she says. “You want to live this way forever? Speaking only when you’re spoken to and always feeling paranoid that our foster parents are talking about us when we’re not in the room—about our futures, our behavior, the way we hold our forks? Huh?”

  I say nothing.

  “Do you want the only love you feel to come from snuggling with your plastic Jesuses and pictures of the kids dressed in Lake Havasu T-shirts?”

  Ouch. One for Camille.

  “No matter where we’ve had to make a home for ourselves, we’ve always shared a lot of love.” I know she’s right—even when it was just Norm, Rosie, and me shivering inside the horse trailer, I’d learned from living for years with my sisters how to create an atmosphere of laughs, comfort, and ease. And when Cookie was around, we’d somehow establish a small space among the chaos for solace, where we could go and be together to talk and snuggle or play games. “By now I know how I want to live my life,” Camille continues, “and it’s not by learning to obey new rules in a strange house. I’ve already raised myself.”

  She gets a job at Wicks ’n’ Sticks, a candle shop at the Smith Haven Mall. In turn I begin making friends at the bus stop. Sheryl and Tracey make it clear they’re talking to me because they’re really interested in coaxing me out of my shell, and it doesn’t take long before I’m spending all my time outside school at their houses. They both have fathers and mothers who live together, two cars in the driveway, swimming pools in the backyard, closets stuffed with well-fitting clothes and, most important to me, refrigerators and pantries stocked with snacks and soda. I find it’s much more comfortable to play the guest outside my foster family’s home than in it.

  It’s fascinating to observe how normal families interact. With a mother and father in the house, it’s as though everyone has a distinct role in the family: Dads work full-time at offices, moms work part-time or run the kids around; we kids can just hang out . . . and be kids. It’s a totally new experience for me. We spend weekday afternoons watching MTV and doing homework and weekends at the movies, the bowling alley, and playing Pac-Man and Centipede at the mall arcade. Tracey giggles at my pronunciation. “It’s Centipede, not Centerpede!” I just shrug and smile.

  These families think they know me well, that I live at my aunt’s house. I never share my story; the details of how I grew up, that I have younger siblings I’m trying to save, or that I have a mentally ill, alcoholic, promiscuous mother who won’t be my mother much longer.

  Camille and I are allowed a once-a-week phone call with Rosie and Norm, who cry in hushes when they tell us their new foster mom never hugs them and then disciplines them with hits and cursing. Over and over they say they’ve tried to tell their social worker, but instead of the sympathy or solutions they need, she tells them they ought to be better listeners. Camille and I tell our social worker that the kids, especially Rosie, would never lie about being hit. We beg Addie to please allow the kids to come live with us. Each time, however, she sadly tells us that she just cannot take them as well. She says she’s already stretching her energy and resources; and besides, Rosie and Norm’s social worker isn’t convinced they’re not just making up these stories because they’re homesick for us.

  As Christmas approaches, a social worker named Ms. Harvey is assigned to our case now that the Petermans have invited us to stay permanently. Her lack of cooperation to help us see the kids causes Camille and me to grow even more reclusive and rebellious, staying out of the house until curfew then locking ourselves in our rooms for the night. When Addie gets our monthly welfare check, she gives us each the county designated amount of sixty-two dollars of the two four-hundred-twelve-dollar checks she receives to use as our personal allowance for clothes, toiletries, books, and school field trips.

  Then in early December the social workers inform us that we’ll get to see the kids for a Christmas visit. Realizing we’ve spent all of our first check on warm coats and snow boots for ourselves, Camille takes a second job selling fragrances in the mall while I begin walking door-to-door to Addie’s neighbors, offering to clean leaves off their lawns before the first snow for ten dollars each. Addie sees how hard we’re working and recommends me to neighbors who need a babysitter who’s willing to clean house . . . and on top of that I make an extra five dollars per week dusting Addie’s furniture.

  When Camille and I go Christmas shopping for Rosie and Norm, my sister follows my lead around the kids’ clothing stores at the mall. “I’m a pro around these parts,” I tell her. “They’ve got sizes that fit me, less expensive than the juniors section. Where do you think I’ve been doing all my shopping?”

  “Save money shopping for kids’ clothes while you can,” Camille says, gesturing at my body. “I can already tell, you’re starting to take some shape. The same thing that happened to me is gonna happen to you: You wake up one morning and—va-va-VOOM!—you need a bra. A real bra,” she whispers. “We oughta place a bet on how much longer you’ll fit into kids’ turtlenecks.”

  “Just help me,” I tell her. She pushes a cart and we load it with gloves, hats, scarves, new underwear, socks, winter boots, some jeans, and a rainbow array of cable-knit sweaters.

  On Sunday, December 23, at one thirty in the afternoon, Cherie picks us up from the Petermans’ and drives us thirty minutes to the kids’ foster home. “Don’t be surprised if they’re not blown away by the gifts,” Camille says. “Cookie’s visitation was from nine to one today, and if she tried to win them over with anything, I guarantee it was toys.”

  “At least her car’s not here,” I say when we pull into the driveway of a dump of a house. The social workers were wise to give us an hour gap so we wouldn’t have to cross paths with our mother.

  Cherie turns off the ignition and helps us unload two stacks of presents so high we have to coach each other to navigate our eager approach to the front door, where we’re met by a woman in a velour jogging suit and giant hair who, instead of welcoming us or introducing herself, tells us Cookie hasn’t returned with the kids yet.

  “Of course she hasn’t,” Cherie says. We look at each other, wondering how long it will take her to invite us in. We finally break the awkwardness and trudge back to the car. Cherie starts the car and flips on the heat full-blast. Then she walks to the corner phone booth to call her husband and tell him she’ll be home later than she planned.

  We sing to the radio and take turns knocking on the front door to ask whether Cookie has called with an update. Hours pass. Cherie tells us she’s running low on gas and has to go home to feed her baby.

  She drives Camille and me back to the Petermans’.

  Every hour we call Rosie and Norm’s house, and the answer is always the same. Hoping she’ll respond first thing Monday morning, we leave a message for Rosie and Norm’s social worker, whose number Addie agreed to pin on the corkboard by her phone.

  We stay up through the night. When Camille’s alarm clock flashes 6:00 in bright red digits, we tiptoe out to Addie’s kitchen and pick up the phone again. Their foster mother’s voice is groggy and irritated, and Rosie and Norm are still gone.

  MS. HARVEY BELIEVES our conclusion that Cookie’s run with the kids. “But it’s Christmas Eve,” she says, “and there’s really not a lot we can do besides wait until the county’s back from the holiday. I wouldn’t worry, though—”

  “Our mother has our e
ight-year-old sister and our twelve-year-old brother holed up in a car behind some grocery store, or in the house of whatever scuzzball she’s sleeping with this week. And you wouldn’t worry?” Camille yells into the phone. I fold my arms across me, sick to my stomach. When Camille gets upset, the weight of my guilt for coming forward multiplies.

  “With the state watching over your mother’s shoulder, it doesn’t seem very likely she would do Norman and Roseanne any harm.”

  “She just kidnapped Norm and Rosie,” Camille says. “And you don’t think we should call the police?”

  “They would have to have been abducted by a stranger to warrant my calling the police.”

  “Our mother is more dangerous to those kids than any stranger,” Camille says. “You’re fools if you don’t track her down.”

  “Merry Christmas, Camille,” Ms. Harvey says, ending the call. “Tell Regina, too. Enjoy your time off from school. When I’m back from holiday vacation, I’ll look up your mother’s most recent address in the files. I’ll get back to you when we have something.”

  It’s after New Year’s when social services finally finds Cookie living at her boyfriend’s house. “My children told me they were being beaten at their foster home. You think I was going to deliver them back to that hell on earth?” she told the workers. “I am their mother. They’re happy with me. Go piss up a tree. I’ll see you in April.”

  Ms. Harvey said that, from everything Norm and Rosie’s social worker reported, the kids were living in a nice house in the same school district and seemed content living as a family with Cookie’s new boyfriend and his teenage daughter. “They’ve decided to let the situation be for now,” Ms. Harvey explained. “But as long as the judge grants Regina’s emancipation at the April hearing, then it’s almost guaranteed the court will determine that Cookie is an unfit caretaker and most likely will remove your brother and sister from her care.”

  Camille’s skeptical. “And why would that be?”