THIS ORDEAL AND countless variations on it happened over and over for the next eighteen months. Sometimes he brought Paige and me into his bed together and made us take turns while the other one watched. He made me use my hands and eventually my mouth.
Sometimes he came into our bedroom, into my bed, in the middle of the night. Eased open the door like an intruder. Stealthy. Silent. He didn’t speak at these times, just put his hands all over my body, hands that eventually guided mine to the place between his legs. Always his rank and terrible breath was in my face, reeking of beer and tobacco chaw.
Once when Paige and I were with him in his bed, doing his bidding, the door opened without warning and Lorraine came in. She didn’t seem shocked or even surprised. She looked exasperated, as if she were finding a mess in a room she had just cleaned. “Get the hell out of here, you little pissants,” she said to Paige and me, as if we were to blame.
Sometimes at night, Ted would get me out of bed and bring me outside to his green Jeep. He lifted me into the back, not bothering with a seat belt, not bothering to speak. I lay across the seat and trembled as he drove way too fast up and down the hills of Santa Rosa, drinking Cutty Sark whiskey straight from the bottle, tilting his head back even as the car careened down the dark streets. After a while, I kept my eyes closed tight, haplessly sliding across the vinyl or tumbling onto the floor whenever he turned a corner.
I WAS EIGHT years old, but I started wetting the bed again that year, which enraged Lorraine.
“You little pissant, what’s the matter with you? Even Steven doesn’t wet the bed anymore and he’s only three!” She slammed the pots and pans around in the sink. “The whole bedroom stinks like piss now. We paid a pretty penny for that mattress too, just a few months ago, and now it’s ruined.”
I stood staring at the linoleum. I was trying hard not to cry—Lorraine hated crying—but I couldn’t stop my lower lip from quivering with shame.
Later that day, I heard one of the neighbors declare across the back fence, “You are an angel on this earth, Lorraine.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she murmured with a little laugh.
“Caring for these poor wards of the state like you do. It takes a special kind of person, that’s all.”
“Well, I don’t know about special,” Lorraine said in that low and honeyed tone. “But we have the room, Ted and I. In our house and in our hearts.”
Her voice so soft and flowery, like a caress.
MY FAVORITE PLACE to be each afternoon was in the backyard with the animals. Every day I cleaned the chicken coop and scattered corn in the yard for them. I brushed Lorraine’s horse and mucked out his stall and brought him fresh hay. I played with the cat, and the rabbits in their hutch.
I felt safe with the animals. The horse was old and gentle. He nuzzled me when I brushed him. The chickens rushed over when I came into the yard with their feed. The speckled one even liked to be snuggled. I stayed with them as long as I could, until Lorraine called everyone in to dinner.
The clock in the living room sounded every hour on the hour. It went off at breakfast and in the evening. It went off in the middle of the night. It never became less frightening to hear its urgent clanging and cooing in the darkness. That sound—mocking, mechanized, relentless—was the sound of savage misery.
FOR YEARS AFTERWARD, I tried to fathom the mystery of Lorraine. Sleek, attractive, an accomplished gardener and equestrienne, a woman who appeared so workaday and reasonable, who had beloved children of her own. She knew just what her husband was doing, and she was fully complicit in bringing him the most vulnerable children, throwaway children, to sodomize. I eventually gleaned that Paige and I were not the first children they fostered. They returned to the dependent unit again and again over the course of many years, looking for children—children who were already broken, children with no recourse and no one to tell—to use.
I do all I can to forget Creekside Drive, but the memories still surface without warning. Not long ago, I was at the home of a friend who kept a flock of chickens in her backyard. We were sitting out on her patio, sharing a bottle of wine, when a speckled hen darted over. Without even thinking, I startled both my friend and myself by drawing the bird to me and snuggling it on my lap.
Once I had to leave a dinner party because the hosts had a cuckoo clock. I didn’t notice it at first but during the cocktail hour I was standing with my husband and two other guests, a drink in my hand, when from a shelf high above I heard that lunatic sound, saw the little wooden door open and the bird pop out like a flasher revealing himself.
“Stephanie! What is it?” Jim asked. I turned to him with a stunned expression, wondering how he knew.
You went so pale, he told me later. You know that saying “white as a ghost?” I didn’t think people really turned pale like that. I never saw it happen before.
I met his eyes, unable to answer, nausea breaking over me like a wave.
“Excuse us,” my husband said swiftly, putting a hand on my back and ushering me through the throng of people. In the foyer he gently took my face in his hands.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I need to leave,” I whispered.
Jim asked no questions, just retrieved my coat from the front closet and put it around my shoulders.
“I’m sorry to have to cut out so suddenly,” I heard him saying to his associate. “I’m afraid my wife is ill.”
AND NOW, on the way to my mother’s apartment, I drove past an old-fashioned diner and suddenly another memory from that era came to me: the one of seeing my mother from Ted’s Jeep. She was in the parking lot of a local Sambo’s restaurant, wearing a waitress’ uniform, a little white dress with an orange apron. There she was, casually at large, out of jail and apparently on her way to work. I had gasped but was borne past her before I even had time to cry out.
A year before, I’d have given anything to get away from her. But by the time I saw her from the window of that Jeep, I would have given anything to go back to her.
Seeing her left me feeling gutted. She was so near. She was free and on the streets. Why didn’t she come for me?
I BARRELED INTO the parking lot of my mother’s complex at high speed, turning the heads of all the tenants smoking inside the nearby gazebo. I threw the car into park, leaped out as if the vehicle were on fire, and burst through the front door of her apartment in a frenzy.
“How could you?” I howled.
My mother, who was lying on the sofa, bolted upright, a look of confusion and fright on her face. I’d woken her, perhaps from a deep sleep, the kind she rarely got these days.
“What? Stephanie? What happened?”
“How could you leave me in that terrible place?”
She blinked at me in bewilderment, but beneath her incomprehension, I thought I could see a certain caginess.
“What are you talking about?”
I dropped onto the sofa. It was all I could do not to take her bony shoulders in both my hands and shake her. “I saw you from the window of Ted’s Jeep. In that Sambo’s parking lot. You were going in to start your shift. You were right in Santa Rosa, not five miles away, and you had your own car. Why didn’t you come and get me?”
“Oh, that.” My mother sighed and looked away. “Listen, Stephanie, I wanted to. I tried. There were things I had to do to get you kids back, and I was doing all those things. I had to hold a steady job for six months. I had to test clean for drugs for six months. I had to get an apartment. If I didn’t follow their rules, they just would have taken you again.”
I turned away from her and my gaze fell on the prescription bottles littering her coffee table, the kitchen counter, and nearly every other available surface. Then I looked back at her wasted face: her hollow cheeks, the jutting prominence of her facial bones, her skull itself seeming to rise into relief before my eyes. My mother was going to die, she would die very soon, and all that was unresolved between us would be unresolved forever.
&
nbsp; “You have no idea what it was like,” I said more quietly now. Finally confronting her about the abuse had taken the rage out of me. “To be trapped in that house. To be violated, day after day.”
“That’s what you think,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“You think I don’t know what it’s like. What do you know about me, Miss High and Mighty? You have no idea who I am. I am a direct descendant—”
“Of George Washington,” I said, cutting her off. “I’ve heard it all before, Mom. And there’s a term for that. It’s called delusions of grandeur.”
“You see?” she answered. “You don’t believe me.”
“No one believes you, Mom. You’re always playing the George Washington card, every time you were arrested, whenever the chips are down. You never seem to get that no one’s impressed. No one cares. Because it’s bullshit.”
“That’s what you think,” she said again. “But what do you know?”
“I know you aren’t related to George Washington,” I told her. “And I know you haven’t been through half of what I have. I know you were never held captive in hell, trapped with sexual predators, used as a plaything by sick people, when you were just a little girl.”
Abruptly it was very quiet in her apartment. There was a charged and wild hush, as when a storm is gathering and the air is electric and still.
My mother’s eyes met mine. The expression on her face was like none I’d ever seen before. There was no trace of Agnes, no trace of Flow. There was no one but her. She looked at me steadily, without a trace of crazy, her eyes as clear and penetrating as a prophet’s.
“You’re mistaken,” she said.
Chapter 11
I FELT SUDDENLY cold, there on my mother’s sofa. The skin prickled on the back of my neck, and I crossed my arms against the chill.
“What are you talking about, Mom?”
“I never told you what happened to me.”
I waited. When she said nothing further, I asked, “Well? What happened?”
“I was raped.”
“You did tell me, Mom. It was by the dumpster outside the apartment you shared with Louie. You told me that story a lot. You even told me the rapist was my father.”
“That’s not the time I’m talking about.”
Again I waited. Again she was silent.
“Were you raped another time?” I finally asked.
“Yes.”
“When?”
The same electric storm warning was in the air. The space between us was almost vibrating with portent. My mother’s lips were quivering. I saw a tremor in her hands and knees.
“I was just eleven. Just a little girl on roller skates. It was a beautiful summer day. I was skating outside with my cousin when some men grabbed us and threw us into their car.”
I sat there as stunned as if she had bashed me in the face with a rock.
“Really?” I managed after a long moment.
“Yes,” she said. “They took us to a building, and I didn’t see her again after that. They brought me up the stairs to a room with no windows. There were so many of them. Fifteen of them. They kept me there a long time.”
I stared at her. She looked straight back at me, as clear-eyed and lucid as she’d ever been.
“How long?” I asked after a moment.
“Ten days.”
“Ten days?” I heard my voice scale up an octave.
“They took turns. They did terrible things to me. Things I never wanted to think about again. Look what you’re doing, you’re forcing me to think about them. It’s so cruel.”
“Mom! I’m not forcing—”
“The mayor’s son was there,” she said, cutting me off.
I choked back an incredulous laugh. “The mayor’s son? Really?”
“They were powerful men, society men. They had ties to the mob.”
The mention of the mob, the mayor, and these so-called powerful men brought a moment of relief. This was—this had to be—another one of her delusions.
“Mom,” I said shakily. “This sounds pretty crazy to me.”
“I didn’t think you would believe me,” she said.
And you were right, I thought.
“Well, how did you get free?” I asked, trying to keep the skepticism from my tone. “I mean, what ended this ordeal?”
“An Indian was there. He saved me.”
“An Indian? Do you mean a man from India, or a Native American?”
“An American Indian. He kept me alive the whole time, in fact.”
“How?”
“It was the way he looked at me. His face was so full of compassion. And he tended to me whenever he could. He was my angel in that pit of hell.”
This settled it: another delusion.
“Mom, this sounds like a bad acid trip. I think it must have been a very vivid hallucination.”
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” she said again. “Well, go look it up then. You’ll see. It was all over the news. It was a huge scandal.”
“What news? Where?”
“In Baltimore. When I was eleven. It was in all the papers.”
She put her head back against the armrest of the couch and closed her eyes.
WHEN I GOT back into my car, I sat there for at least five minutes with my head against the steering wheel. There was no way my mother’s story was true. The terrible images she had conjured left me sick and shaken anyway. My own daughter was eleven.
Why did I keep coming to see her, every time she summoned me? Sometimes it took days to recover. With something like desperation, I reached for my phone to text my “good mother,” my Mama Mae, the one who loved me.
I know this is short notice, I typed to her. But is there any chance you’re around this afternoon? I’m going through a rough time right now and it always helps to talk with you.
Come right over, my sweet girl, she wrote back immediately. I’ll make you lunch and we’ll eat on the back deck. It’s been too long since I’ve seen your beautiful face.
My eyes welled with gratitude as I put the key in the ignition.
“I’M SO GLAD you’re here,” Mae said, leaning across the table to push a strand of hair back behind my ear. As promised, we were on the deck overlooking her lovely backyard. It was so tranquil here, so serene. “I couldn’t believe it when you texted. Owen and I were talking about you not one hour before! He says you’re almost done with his house and, well, maybe I shouldn’t repeat this, but he told me he’ll miss you when you’re done.”
“It’s been great for me too,” I said. I found it hard to meet Mae’s eyes just then and looked away instead.
“Oh, I shouldn’t say this, I know I shouldn’t,” she continued. “But Steph, honey, I can’t help wishing for a daughter-in-law just like you. Even though I know I’m pining for the impossible. You’re happily married, after all.”
“Not so happily lately,” I heard myself say.
“Will you tell me what’s going on? You look positively haunted.”
I looked away again, afraid I was going to cry uncontrollably. Mae’s love affected me that way.
“Is it your mother?”
I brought my gaze back to Mae and nodded.
“I just don’t know how she can torment you so,” she said softly. “I would be so proud to have a daughter like you. She doesn’t know how lucky she is.”
“I wish I had never let her rope me back in,” I told her. “The most peaceful years of my life were after the court issued a stalking order against her. She wasn’t allowed to contact me. I never should have let her violate it.”
“I didn’t know you had a stalking order against her,” Mae said. “Oh my goodness. When was this? What brought it about?”
IT BEGAN WITH a call from my son’s high school office.
“Mrs. Plymale?” the secretary said. “A woman who says her name is Flo is here to pick up Jeremy.”
In the background, I could hear my mother’s strident voice
. “I’m taking him to the dermatologist because his mother won’t do it!” she was ranting. “She’s nothing but a selfish bitch, content to let her own son walk around with hideous red craters all over his face.”
She was referring to Jeremy’s case of mild acne, no more than was typical for any teen.
“That poor boy was so handsome and his good looks are ruined!” I heard her yelling. “All because of her!”
“Do not, under any circumstances, let him leave with her,” I said, alarmed. “She is mentally unstable and dangerous. Please call the police.”
I had already risen from my desk at work. I was reaching for my keys. “I will pick him up,” I told the school secretary. “Do not let her anywhere near him.”
The school day had just ended when I arrived on the street flanking the right side of the building. Kids were still streaming out the door. Jeremy was standing out front, next to the assistant principal. I hurried over to them.
“We called the police,” she told me. “They came and told Jeremy’s grandmother that she couldn’t be on school grounds. She’s across the street right now.” And she pointed to the opposite sidewalk, where my mother was sitting cross-legged on the ground. Even from this distance I could see that her mouth was drawn down in a deep scowl and feathers were sticking out of her hair.
Jeremy looked at me with tears in his eyes. “The freaking cops were here because of her,” he said hoarsely. “A couple of the other kids were in the office when she was here, and now they’ll probably tell the whole school. Why would she do this to me, Mom? This is the worst day of my life.”
“I’m so sorry, honey,” I said, tears pricking at the corners of my own eyes. This was my fault somehow. I had failed to protect my son from her.
I put my arm around his shoulders and ushered him off to the side of the building, where my car was waiting at the curb. I did not look in my mother’s direction. She was still sitting on the sidewalk as I put my car in gear and drove away.
Soon afterward the phone calls began. They came at all hours. In the afternoon, in the evening, in the middle of the night. I don’t have words for the terror of those phone calls. Even now, recalling them, my mouth goes dry, and I can feel my blood pressure spiking.
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