Etched in Sand

by Regina Calcaterra

  “Your case hasn’t gone to court, so your mother gets the benefit of the doubt. But once the judge reads your statement, he’d be crazy to let her keep Norman and Roseanne.”

  “Sure, go ahead and wait,” Camille says. “But Cookie knows what’s coming. By April, you watch. She’ll be long gone.”

  WITH COOKIE’S ABDUCTION of the kids looming over us, even our February vacation to Disney World in the Petermans’ RV is hard to enjoy. Our teachers sent a list of reading and homework for us to do on the three-day trip down the East Coast, but instead we play Scrabble and the license plate game . . . and even then, my mind drifts to thinking about what Rosie and Norm must be going through. Every time Pete stops at a gas station, I eye the phone booth. I’ve got change to make a long-distance call and Ms. Harvey’s number memorized . . . but considering the results of all the calls up to now, I figure the money will be better spent on Mickey souvenirs for whenever I do see the kids.

  In March, Cherie shows up at the Petermans’ house in a tizzy. “Cookie was arrested for stealing from her boyfriend’s house,” she says. “She called me to bail her out.”

  “Did you do it?” Camille and I ask in unison.

  “Yes, I did it. I couldn’t think of what else to do, I was so worried about what would happen to Rosie and Norman with no one there to protect them if the cops showed up. I can’t ask my mother-in-law to have them stay here. So I said to Cookie, ‘If you want me to get your ass out of jail, you better tell me: Where are the kids?’

  “ ‘The kids,’ she tells me, ‘are in a hotel that I went to after Jeff kicked us out.’

  “And I go, ‘Oh, Jeff?’ ” Cherie says. “And I’m just supposed to know who Jeff is? So she gets all snotty: ‘Who the fuck do you think he is, Cherie? He’s the guy I’ve been living with the past couple months.’ I thought I would throw the phone at the wall. ‘Norm is there, watching Rosie,’ Cookie says. ‘He’s twelve—practically a young man now!’ ”

  “Oh crap,” I say. “Did they see her get arrested?”

  “That’s what I asked her,” Cherie says. “Cookie tells me, ‘Nope,’ all dismissive. ‘They busted me in the pub parking lot. See, I went to meet Jeff so we could talk it out, but he set me up. Next thing I know, I’m in cuffs.’ ” Cherie explains that the cops had social services track down the kids, who were staying in a motel.

  I march to Addie’s kitchen phone. “I’m calling Ms. Harvey.”

  When she answers, she explains: “The cops decided Norman is old enough to watch Roseanne while Cookie is incarcerated for assault and battery.”

  “Wait, Ms. Harvey, let me get this straight: Cookie is arrested for trying to beat up her boyfriend—in jail for the weekend—and our little brother is watching Rosie by himself?”

  “Regina, I’m just telling you what the police told me.”

  “Who’s paying for the room? What if they get kicked out? Then what?”

  “Well, in that case they would be homeless and we would place them in another home. But until then, the authorities have decided that they’re both safe and secure. Besides, now that your mother’s bailed out, she’ll probably be back with them in a few hours.”

  Camille and I have devised a plan: The only way we can watch out for Rosie and Norm is to convince Cookie that all’s forgiven and we still want her in our lives.

  “She’s a lunatic,” Cherie says. “You sure you want to go through with this cockamamy plan?”

  With Daisy Duck and Goofy ball caps in a bag as souvenirs, we wait at the motel room’s outside entrance until Cookie answers with a cigarette between her fingers like some Hollywood vixen. “Well well well,” she says, holding the door as though she has to consider letting us in. “Just like always, you two come crawling back.”

  Camille occupies Rosie and Norm while I sit down on the bed, across from where Cookie’s seated at the motel room’s desk. Without looking at me, she says, “I see you’re starting to come into your own. Shocker with those little tits, nobody’s knocked you up yet.”

  “I didn’t come here to be the butt of any insults,” I answer. “I really want to work this out.”

  “Well, don’t try to buy me with any sweet talk. You ratted me out to every official in Suffolk County when all I’ve ever done was work hard to give you kids a good life.”

  “Ratted you out?”

  In the background Camille turns on the TV for Rosie and Norm.

  “You are required by law to attend the emancipation hearing of Regina M. Calcaterra,” she recites. “What are you, fucking Queen Elizabeth? I got friends, you know. I know what emancipation means.”

  Camille slides to sit on the bed next to me. Cookie lights another cigarette. “There’s been a lot of confusion,” my sister says. “But Regina and I are always talking about how we miss being a family.”

  “What the fuck do you two want?”

  “We want to see you. And Norman and Rosie.”

  I pipe in. “And you know, it won’t be long before I’m eighteen.” I remember how Ms. Harvey suggested I try to maintain contact with Cookie in the event I need a place to go when I age out of foster care. I tell Cookie: “I’ll have the choice of who I want to live with. Who knows, maybe we’ll want to be a family again. Maybe things could be normal.”

  “Regina, you’ve been running away from me since the day you sprouted legs,” she says. “If you think for half a second that I’ll support you when you’re an adult, then you better quit whatever it is you’re smokin’ now.”

  “We just want you in our life . . . Mom.” The word tastes like vinegar in my mouth.

  “Well, you little assholes should have thought of that before the county asked me to RSVP to the Regina Calcaterra Independence Day Parade.” She takes a drag off her cigarette. “Is Cherie waiting for you in the car? Get the fuck out of here.”

  Camille and I exchange a glance, rise, and approach the kids to hug them good-bye. When Camille takes off outside, I follow, slamming the door to Cookie’s motel room so hard the windows shake.

  IN APRIL, CAMILLE is watching me closely. I’m not eating again, thanks to the nerves the emancipation hearing is kicking up in my stomach. “You don’t even have to go,” Camille says. “Ms. Harvey is your court-appointed guardian, she’ll be doing all the talking.”

  With how poorly she’s protected the kids these last few months, unfortunately that information is zero comfort.

  The afternoon of the hearing, when Camille and I arrive home from school, Addie’s in the kitchen tapping her finger on a cup of coffee. “What?” I ask her. “The news isn’t good?”

  “It’s good for you,” Addie says. “You won by default.”

  “Default?”

  “Your mother didn’t show up to the hearing. The judge made a default judgment against her.”

  “Regina!” Camille says. “You did it!”

  “Wait,” I ask Addie, pulling back from Camille’s hug. “Rosie and Norm: They’re free from her, too?”

  “Regina, that’s the bittersweet part,” Addie says. “You don’t have any control over what happens to your brother and sister. For now, the court decided to leave them with your mother.”

  I stare at her, indignant. I don’t have any control? I look at Camille, whose eyes are welling with tears. We can’t be happy for my freedom while there’s any ounce of possibility that our younger siblings will be forced to suffer with Cookie. I flee from the kitchen and slam my bedroom door. I grab everything I can get my hands on and throw it: the only outlet I’ve ever found effective when I’m in a blind rage.

  ONE MORNING IN May, Addie and Camille exchange a knowing glance when I come out to the kitchen with stomach pains so bad I think I might throw up. “Maybe you should stay home from school,” Addie says.

  Camille knocks on the bathroom door just as I’m discovering a spot of blood on my leg. “Honey,” she calls, “why don’t you let me help?” She inconspicuously edges inside the bathroom and shows me how to adhere a maxi pad. “And here’s wh
ere Addie keeps our stashes. Always make sure you have extras in your bag . . . especially if you visit Cookie.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she doesn’t buy these. She’d rather spend the food stamps on beer and cigarettes. Remember the bloody washcloths she used to leave around the house?”

  I grimace. “Oh, Camille!”

  “Yeah. I know. It was gross.”

  In the kitchen, Addie’s looking through the phone book. “I’m going to make you an appointment at the doctor,” she says.

  “The doctor? I’m not sick, I just got my period.”

  “Well, there are precautions certain young women should take when their bodies grow capable of bearing children.” Oh, that’s what this is about: Addie’s afraid she’ll be raising a foster grandchild if she doesn’t get me on the pill. “Birth control helps regulate a woman’s cycle,” she says.

  I want to tell her to cut the crap. I could teach sex education at my school better than any teacher who actually studied it. At the age of eight, I learned how one gives a blow job thanks to Cookie’s demonstration on one of her boyfriends when she thought we were all asleep. At twelve, I walked into my mother’s bedroom to find a huge pink dildo and a magazine called High Society laying open to a letter from a man detailing his one-night stand with a female gymnast so skilled that when she swung from the chandelier, she landed in a split, directly on his erect penis. Thanks to my mother’s graphic language and her casual displays around the house (like how she would grab Karl between his legs in front of us), when you grow up witness to such sexual behavior, nothing about it is very fascinating. In fact, it shuts out any desire whatsoever.

  Still, with Addie’s incessant urging, I make a trip to the gynecologist. The county bus system is so infrequent and confusing that I arrive late, alone, and even more stressed out than I’d prepared myself for. When the nurse calls me into the sterile gray room, I follow her instruction to lie on the table. “Slide your feet into the stirrups, please,” she says, and I feel the blood rush from my face when the doctor walks in the door. After barely an introduction I feel the heat of his examining light between my legs, and my body clenches with the touch of his medical instruments. Suddenly I’m back in that foster home seven years ago, on the winter night when my sisters were locked out in the cold and Norm was banging on the door. “Let my sister go!” he’d screamed. This doesn’t feel much different. I feel violated, isolated, and quite certain that this makes it official: I never want to allow a boy to touch me again.

  It seems like no one besides Camille will give me a straight talk about womanhood, although some adults do seem to care enough to fumble through a few tidbits. On the last day of freshman year, I go home with my friend Sheryl, whose mom takes us to the park at the Wood Road School. I catch her eyeing my orange tank top before she says, “Girls, this is probably a good time to bring this up, and I’m only going to say it once: Never sit on the same swing with a boy.”

  Sheryl and I look at each other bewildered. “Mom, why?” she asks.

  “Because there are two swings: one for each of you. So you can swing, and he can swing, and you can even swing at the same time . . . but separately, you see. Never together.”

  We break into a fit of laughter. “Mom,” Sheryl says. “What about the teeter-totter?”

  “Girls, I’m serious: There will be no bumping on the swings.”

  “Thank you very much for that informative birds and bees talk, Mrs. Z,” I say, and Sheryl and I run for the swings, wrapping our arms around our shoulders with our imaginary swing-bumping boyfriends.

  That summer, Cherie is tied up with the baby. Camille’s still at the Petermans’ but often working twelve hours a day. I spend my days babysitting the kids on Addie’s street or with Sheryl and Tracey, taking the nine A.M. bus to Smith Point Beach and hopping the five P.M. bus home. We buzz about the thought of entering tenth grade and trying out for gymnastics. Secretly, I’m also excited because it’s the first time I’ll start the school year with a close-knit group of friends and a wardrobe I’m actually not embarrassed to wear.

  The first week of school I’m dumbstruck when the gymnastics coach reads my name off the list of girls who made the cut. “Coach,” I say, while the other girls are busy in huddled squeals. “I couldn’t even take a stab at the bars.”

  “Your upper body needs some strengthening, but your legs are cut and you’re strong on the beam. I’m going to start you with the junior varsity team.”

  Instantly, I begin to structure my days around a full day of school followed by gymnastics practice until six thirty, then babysitting and housecleaning jobs. In study hall, while the other kids sketch the logos of Van Halen and AC/DC on their notebooks, I doodle Rosie and Norman in hearts and bubbles with mia bambina amore and je t’aime scribbed around them. Any homework I don’t get done at school is a good excuse for me to maintain my privacy when I get home in the evenings.

  One night in early October, Addie knocks on my bedroom door. “You have a visitor,” she says. Cherie appears behind her in the doorway, and Camille pops her head out of her bedroom.

  “What are you doing here?” Camille says. “You never stop over without calling first.”

  Cherie looks at the ceiling as if she’s praying to save her last nerve. “Cookie was driving drunk and she got into an accident,” she says. “She left the scene, and the police were looking for her . . . and . . . she skipped town with the kids.”

  Camille asks, “Wait, I didn’t hear this part. What do you mean ‘skipped town’?”

  Cherie says, “I got a call from Cookie’s friend Jackie Sones. You remember her? She lived near us in Saint James.”

  “Jackie Sones—the one who moved to Idaho?”

  “Yeah,” Cherie says, clearly dreading what she has to reveal next. “She told me Cookie is heading out there so she can live in Jackie’s trailer and work with animals on a farm. So, with the kids, off she drove.”

  We walk out to the kitchen, where Addie gives us permission to call Ms. Harvey at home. “Girls, there’s nothing anybody here can do if your mother left the state.”

  “Oh, big shock,” I say, “considering how much you did to protect them while they were here.”

  It’s close to Halloween when Jackie Sones calls Cherie to tell her Cookie and the kids have arrived.

  “They stayed with Jackie a few weeks until Cookie found a bowlegged old man named Clyde who lives on a farm in some town called Oakview,” Camille tells me.

  “Let me guess, so she used her ways to convince him that he would be better off if her brood moves in.”

  We learn that, to maintain her part of the bargain, Cookie volunteered the kids to work as farmhands. They rise every morning to milk the cows, shovel horse manure, bale hay, and tend the crops. “I know how this works,” I tell Camille. “If they don’t step up, they’ll get beaten.”

  “Yeah,” she sighs. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Well, at least they’re in a small town. When we figure out how to fix this, hopefully it will be easy to find them.”

  She gives me Clyde’s phone number, which Jackie shared with her. I pop more quarters in the pay phone. A gruff, bothered male voice answers. “Yeah?”

  “Is this Clyde?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m Regina, Cookie’s daughter, calling from New York. Can you please put Rosie on the phone?”

  After some murmurs and the croak of Cookie’s voice objecting in the background, I finally hear Rosie’s tender voice: “Gi?”

  Tears gush out of my eyes. “Bambina?” I ask her. “Are you and Norman okay?”

  She stays quiet.

  “Is Mom standing right there?”

  I hear her debating over how to respond. “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I’m going to speak quietly, but here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to ask you some questions. If the answer is yes, you’ll pretend to answer me about life on the farm. Like, ‘Yes, there are lots of animals here.’ And if t
he answer if no, you’ll do the same thing—‘No, it hasn’t snowed here yet. Silly Regina, it’s only October.’ You ready?”

  “Yes, there are lots of animals here.”

  I giggle. “Good, you get it!” Through a conversation carried in this kind of code, Rosie makes it clear that she and Norm are attending school regularly, but also that Cookie and Clyde are abusing her. That night I call Ms. Harvey, who says the usual: “There’s really nothing we can do.”

  Over the next week, I continue making these coded calls to Rosie and Norman, and they reveal as much as they can through the feigned conversations. Then I call information and ask for the number to the elementary school in Oakview, Idaho. “May I speak with the guidance counselor please?” I ask.

  When he’s patched through I tell him about Cookie’s history and what’s been happening to Rosie. Then Cookie calls me at Addie’s to tell me the guidance counselor brought her in for a meeting to check out my story. “And when I asked the kids what the hell was going on, they told me the whole thing,” Cookie says. “You three have a code when you call here. You give them the third degree, then you think you have us all figured out. Well guess what,” she says with a low growl. “I told the guidance counselor the truth: that you’re a juvenile delinquent and alcoholic liar who was committed to a foster home to keep your ass out of jail. And do you think I was proud to tell him that Rosie is a promiscuous nine-year-old who made advances toward Clyde? Then when he rejected her, she started making up stories! That’s how it went, Regina. It was humiliating to talk about what derelicts my children have turned out to be. Although, knowing the kind of man your father is, I don’t know why I’m surprised. And for the record, the marks on her body? Those are from the farmwork. You don’t get to live and eat for free, in Idaho or Long Island or anywhere else.”

  Sobbing, I call Ms. Harvey and beg her to speak to Rosie and Norm’s guidance counselor in Idaho and tell him that she outright lied to him about the kids and me. “Please, to hear this woman, she’s totally insane!”

  Ms. Harvey refuses. “Your siblings are in the hands of another state now, Regina. For the last time, I’ll tell you: There is nothing we can do.”