I never knew what to expect when I saw her name on my phone. So often it was someone else calling from her number. Like Bart, the manager of her apartment complex, getting in touch to report an emergency. Or maybe the police, to let me know she was under arrest. Or it could be the intake personnel at the state psych ward, informing me that she’d been committed again.
Even when it was her, there was no telling which persona would be on the other side of the line. If she identified herself as my mother, or by her given name of Florence, then we might have something resembling a regular conversation. But if it were Flow, the persona she identified as an “Indian,” I could expect psychotic rambling, hostility, curses, threats, and abuse. And if it were Agnes, I would inevitably spend time trying to console her. Agnes was an eleven-year-old girl: fragile, broken-hearted, and inconsolable. When my mother was Agnes, she played with dolls, or lay on the floor and crayoned, or crouched in the corner and sobbed. She bit her cuticles until they bled and slept with a teddy bear.
Seeing her name on the screen sent a violent tremor down my legs. The peaceful evening I’d hoped for at home was undone in that moment. No interaction with her came without high anxiety and lingering distress.
I wish I could say I wavered over whether to pick up the phone, but I didn’t. I snatched it up the moment it began to ring. I missed her.
“Hello?”
“Stephanie? It’s Mom.”
“I know,” I said. A sharp ache rose in my throat as I asked, “How are you, Mom?”
“Well, I’m not so good, to tell you the truth.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, afraid to know.
“The doctors say I have lung cancer,” she said.
“Lung cancer?”
I felt tears come into my eyes. Wasn’t that the worst kind? I’d never heard of anyone surviving lung cancer.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I said. “Do they know how far it’s progressed?”
“It’s stage four,” she told me. “I have two tumors, and it’s already spread to my spine. They told me I have about six months left.”
My throat closed over. I managed to choke out that I would call her back soon. And that I would come see her.
As painful and crazy-making and difficult as my relationship with my mother had always been, it was even more difficult to imagine it ending forever. I wasn’t ready. There was too much I still didn’t understand, too many questions left unanswered.
But one thing was clear. I couldn’t put off the asking, or knowing, anymore. Time was suddenly much too scarce for that. I had to confront our shared past and all its mysteries before she was gone for good.
I could no longer tell myself I’d get to it someday. I had to do it now.
Chapter 3
THE QUESTION I’M asked most often is How?
I’ve heard it from therapists, social workers, case managers, and cops. The people well acquainted with my mother tend to do a double take when they meet me.
“You’re Florence’s daughter? You?”
It’s been asked with respect and with disdain.
“You sure got some messed-up genes,” one of my in-laws remarked not long ago. “I don’t know how you overcame all that.”
“Your mom is trash,” a former neighbor of hers told me recently. “How’d you turn out so different from her?”
And then there was the judge who recently granted me legal guardianship of my mother after her terminal diagnosis. She looked at the long, long list of her psychiatric hospitalizations, arrests, felonies, misdemeanors, and mental illnesses. Then she looked into my eyes with a gentle regard that brought a knot to my throat. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “how did you rise above . . . all this?”
The answer I give depends on the day.
Sometimes I say it’s the decision I made when I was still a child, to be the opposite of my mother in every way I could and in everything I did. My college friends dabbled in recreational drugs; I didn’t dare. They flitted from lover to lover; I was already married.
Sometimes I say that being the kind of mother I never had is what saved me.
Sometimes I say that my passion for design carried me through: the drive to create sanctuary, shelter, and beauty for my own family and for others.
But the real answer, the answer threaded through everything, lying beneath and rising above everything—the truest answer to How?
Is Jim.
I WAS ONLY fifteen when I met my husband. I was standing on the sidewalk outside school with my brother Allan when he coasted up to us on a skateboard. He was tall and lean with blue-green eyes and longish blond hair. He and Allan had met at a party the weekend before, and as they spent a moment in banter, I felt his gaze on me. It was strong and warm, and even in that brief wordless instant I had the urge to turn all of myself toward it as some flowers turn toward the sun.
“Who was that?” I asked Allan afterward. He hadn’t thought to introduce us.
“Oh, that was Jim. He’s cool,” Allan said.
Allan was my favorite sibling, really the only friend I ever had within the family. I trusted his judgment. He was someone I’d confide in. But I remember dropping my eyes, jamming my hands into the pockets of my sweater, turning inward. Premonition would be too strong a word for what I felt. It was more like a faint rustling, some secret and speculative tendril that unfurled inside me, a conviction that something important had just happened.
And I wasn’t wrong. The next day during P.E., when I finished the 200-meter race, Jim was lingering near the finish line.
“You’re Allan’s sister, right?” he said. “My name is Jim.”
I know, I almost said, but didn’t. “I’m Stephanie,” I said instead.
“Hi, Stephanie.”
“Hi.”
I could barely look at him. I was disheveled from running, winded, and sweating. Jim looked athletic and handsome. He carried himself with the confidence of someone who sat down with his family and said grace.
But he kept showing up. It seemed that every time I turned around, he was there, or nearby. I saw him in the halls, in the cafeteria, on the front steps after school let out. He always sought my eyes, always said hello.
I returned his greeting every time, but then I dropped my gaze. Afraid to believe this was real, that he could really be interested in me. I didn’t belong with someone like him. I was marked. I was damaged. Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t everyone?
And then, on Friday of that week, as I sat apart from the other kids in the auditorium waiting for an assembly to begin, he materialized beside me and took the empty seat next to mine.
“Hey, Stephanie. How’s it going?”
“Hey,” I said.
I don’t remember what else we said as others filled in the seats around us. And I don’t remember what the slide show presentation was about. All I know is that as the principal stepped up to the podium and the lights were lowered, Jim reached out and took my hand.
I WAS NEVER alone again. Jim walked me to my classes. He walked me to my bus after school. Later when I took a waitressing job in town, he was there to pick me up each evening at the end of my shift and walk me the two miles to my house, after which he would walk another three miles back to his own house. He did this many times a week.
When I was sick, he came to sit with me. He brought me aspirin and ginger ale and sat by my bed stroking my hair.
He was at my side at every possible moment, but beyond that, he insisted on knowing me. All my life I’d kept others at a safe distance, lest they get too close and learn too much. Occasionally I went to other kids’ homes to play, but I could never have them over in return. Who knew what they might see?
With Jim, I could no longer hide. I didn’t want to. He made me feel safe and let me step out from beneath the crushing yoke of secrecy. It happened early, just a week or two into our fledgling romance. We were at the house of one of his friends, alone in a borrowed bedroom.
I’ll never forget th
at room. There was a red lava lamp on the bedside table, an overflowing laundry hamper in one corner, a set of weights beside it, clothing strewn all over the floor. There were posters on the wall: a Seattle Seahawk tackling another player, Christie Brinkley in a bikini.
Jim and I were lying on the twin bed with all our clothes on. We were kissing, touching lightly, pressed together. Outside it was raining. I loved the sound of it on the roof. I loved the feeling of lying next to Jim with my head against his shoulder and both of his arms around me. Being held was such an unfamiliar sensation. Love was happening; it was happening to me. Every single thing about it was a shock, and I was living in a state of continual disbelief.
“What time does your mom want you home?” Jim asked. It was such an innocent question. He had no idea what it was about to unleash.
“I don’t live with my mom,” I heard myself tell him.
“Oh,” he said. He was startled. “Are your parents split up? Do you live with your dad?”
“No, I’m in a foster home right now.”
Consternation creased his face.
“Wow,” he said. “I . . . I didn’t know. Is that rough?”
I choked back a laugh. Was it rough? Compared to the other homes I’d lived in, it was a dream. Bonnie left me alone. She didn’t demand that I turn over most of my earnings to her for rent, as my mother did the moment I got a job. True, she took no interest in me at all, never showed any warmth or asked how things were going, but at her house, there was safety and order. There was food in the refrigerator every day and dinner on the table every night. I could concentrate on my homework. There was no drama, no violence, and no abuse. There was no terror. I could close my eyes and fall asleep at the end of each day without the dread of someone coming into my room, into my bed, in the deep of night. All these things added up to the sweetest relief I’d ever known, and every waking hour I was grateful for them.
“No, it’s good,” I said. “I like it there.”
“Why don’t you live with your mom or dad?”
For fourteen years, I’d shied away from personal questions, responding with vague answers or other evasions. But on that bed with Jim, for the first time ever, I felt I could loosen the lid I kept on my life story.
“My father’s dead,” I told him. Then seeing his stricken expression, I added: “I don’t really remember him. He died when I was three.”
“How?”
“He committed suicide in a motel.”
Jim let this reply hang in the air for a moment before asking, “What about your mom?”
“My mother is . . . well, to be honest, she’s clinically psychotic,” I said. This was a phrase a social worker had used to describe her, and I liked the air of distance it seemed to lend me now. As if the conundrum of my mother could be contained in a label, filed away with professional detachment. “I’ve been in and out of foster homes all my life, whenever she’s in jail or in a psych ward.”
I could hardly believe I was telling him these things. Telling felt perilous and electric and suddenly as destined as a fate foretold in a legend. As if it had been written that Jim, and only Jim, was to be the keeper of my secrets.
“Is she in jail right now?” he asked. “Or in a psych ward?”
“Actually, right now she’s not in either one.”
“Then why are you in a foster home now?”
I wondered how to tell him about the incident that had driven me from my mother’s home this time around. It had happened on a Sunday morning. I’d slept at a friend’s the night before because some man was passed out on our couch. He showed up at our door that morning, saying he was a friend of Rick—my stepfather—and that he needed a place to crash. My mother let him in even though we hadn’t seen Rick in months, but then she went out, leaving us alone with him. I didn’t like the way he looked at me, so when Leigh-Ann, a friend in the same apartment complex, invited me to sleep over, I was glad to go.
Even now, my memories of the next morning aren’t more than a series of snapshots, lacking clarity or continuity.
Snapshot one: I’m easing myself through the front door of our apartment. From the moment I step inside, I know something is very wrong. The air is eerily silent and still, rank with stale alcohol and cigarette smoke and body odor and something else. A heavy and suffocating musk hangs in the air, an atmosphere of terror.
Snapshot two: The kitchen is a mess. Crushed beer cans and empty liquor bottles and overflowing ashtrays and BB guns are lying on the counters, the table, the floor. Dirty dishes are piled in the sink. Flies are crawling on every surface and dotting the air; their buzzing is the only sound. A set of stairs just off the kitchen leads to the bedrooms, where I’d meant to go in search of my bathing suit, but for some reason I’m afraid to venture up there. My heart is beating hard as I tentatively call, “Hello?”
Snapshot three: Isabella is peering around the wall at the top of the stairs, as if to confirm that it’s really me, that no one else is with me and it’s safe to emerge. Her eyes are wild with fear; I can see it from fifty feet away. Then she is flying down to the kitchen like a hunted deer might burst from the brush into a clearing. She is in a tank top and shorts and even in the blur of her descent I can see that something unspeakable has been done to her. From the hem of her shorts to the middle of her calves, her legs are purple with bruises. Her inner thighs are a deep black and blue, with raw bloodied punctures here and there as if she has been shot with a pellet gun.
Snapshot four: I’m gasping, crying. Isabella! Isabella, what happened? What happened to you? But she won’t answer. She won’t even look at me.
Snapshot five: The police are at the door, responding to a report of an assault. They drape a dark blanket around my sister’s shoulders and take her away in their car.
FOR THE FIRST time in my life, I told this story to another person. I told it to Jim. I told him a lot of other things too.
I told him about the stepfather who drifted in and out of our lives between prison stints, other lovers, and criminal enterprises of all kinds. About the parade of drug-addled, lawless, and marginal men my mother brought home in relentless succession. About the cast of characters that inhabited my mother and never knowing which of them I’d be dealing with on any given day. About living in our car and the long aimless days of wandering the beach and eating nothing but seaweed.
I told him about living in the dependent unit of the state of California, with all my belongings in a trash bag. Not knowing where my brothers were or whether I would see them again or where the screams were coming from in the night. I told him about the foster homes where I was violated on a nightly basis. About the vision issues I had as a child that were never addressed by an adult, therefore never treated by a doctor, and ultimately led to blindness in one of my eyes. I told him about the hunger and the cold and the homelessness and the loneliness and the chaos and the drugs and the confusion and the abuse.
I told him everything, and with each word I spoke I felt the weight of isolation being lifted from me, almost as if a heavy animal hide were being tugged from my shoulders. It felt as if I could draw a deep breath for the first time.
“I feel funny telling you these things,” I said after we’d been talking for a long time.
“Why?”
“I’ve never told anyone before,” I said. “About any of it.”
“I’m glad you told me, Stephanie,” he said. “I want to be here for you. I don’t want you to feel alone.”
AND I NEVER WAS. That autumn was dazzling: The trees were ablaze with color, the light was golden, and the days were crisp and clear. The scent of wood smoke hung in the air and I wasn’t alone anymore. I wasn’t alone anymore.
Then we turned back the clocks, and the golden light waned, and the leaves fell off the trees and evening set in at four thirty in the afternoon, but none of that mattered because I still wasn’t alone anymore. The darkness could not engulf me. The chill in the air couldn’t touch me.
And then suddenl
y it was Christmas.
Throughout the holiday season, there had been parties and visits hosted by Bonnie’s friends. And in each of these homes, amid the joyful greetings at the door, I was aware of an undercurrent of alarm on the part of the hostess, a whispered flurry of instructions to the nearest family member.
Oh . . . she’s here . . . I forgot Bonnie’s fostering some friend of Leigh-Ann’s . . . quick, get one of the spare gifts in the hall closet . . .
And out would come a generic present kept on hand for emergencies like this, carefully chosen to work for any age or gender. Like a knitted red scarf. Or a reindeer mug with a package of cocoa mix and marshmallows tucked inside. Or a desk calendar of inspirational quotes.
But on the Christmas Eve of my fifteenth year, a car pulled up to the curb outside Bonnie’s house and Jim got out. He wasn’t yet old enough to drive. His mother had brought him over and she didn’t get out of the car. From the window I watched him open the trunk, and a minute later he was at the door, holding a box in both gloved hands.
How can I describe the wonder of that moment? Since then, Jim has given me much more extravagant gifts, and each one has brought me joy, but none of them ever made me happier than I was that cold, clear starry night when he came through the door with a present he had chosen for me, in a shining red-and-gold-striped box.
In my entire life, I had never celebrated a holiday or birthday with my family. Neither my siblings nor I had ever gotten a single gift for Christmas. The holiday-standard and impersonal items from strangers here and there—plainly wrapped and waiting in supply closets for spare guests—were the only ones I’d ever received.
So when Jim held out the box for me to take, I was too stunned to speak or move.
“Steph?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s for me?” I asked.
He laughed. “Of course it is. Open it.”
American Daughter Page 3