The Children of Main Street

by Merilyn Howton Marriott

  She didn’t seem to notice that tears flooded her cheeks, but her body language drew a line I decided not to cross. Not on her initial visit.

  After a while, she returned to the front, and Justin slipped into my treatment room. He sunk back into the deep pink and burgundy sofa, and for a moment, I thought it might swallow him alive.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Justin looked up at me. His face was flanked by large ears and held high over small shoulders. Blue irises bulged inside webs of red veins. At twelve, he didn’t need to pretend he wasn’t crying. Only when he spoke of his father having been a deacon did he gulp for air and squeeze words one syllable at a time.

  “I’m the man of the house now,” he told me.

  “You’re not,” I said, hoping to reassure him. “Oh no, you are not, sweetheart. You’re just a little boy. Little boys aren’t the heads of houses or anything else.”

  But he didn’t hear me. “I went into the back pasture to feed the horses after my daddy left,” he said, his words coming over mine. “I always fed the horses. No matter what, the horses have to eat. That’s what Daddy always told me. Always feed the horses.” Before I could respond, Justin turned snapping-turtle eyes to me. With a huge gulp of air, he threw words toward the ceiling. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

  Twelve years old.

  Oh, honey … He hasn’t … He hasn’t …

  I walked over to the sofa, sat next to him, and drew him into my arms, remaining silent. Choosing to say the words another day. “Justin, can I pray for you?”

  “No, ma’am. For the first time in my life … no, ma’am.”

  “That’s okay.”

  He stood then. Stood and walked out of the door as though the session was over at his command. How could this beautiful boy be saddled with so much grief? Horses appeared to be his focus. I didn’t know about his relationship with his dad but noted in the chart later that perhaps Justin found it easier to project his grief onto his horses than his father.

  Kids do what they must, to survive. “Lord give me words for this kid,” I said, then clicked the top back over my pen.

  Their appointments fell mostly on Friday mornings at ten. The weeks crept by, and the summer sun climbed high in the Texas sky, toasting the grass outside the clinic to a golden brown. All the life sucked from the red-and-white striped petunias planted in clay pots on the front porch. The heat left nothing but innocent-looking bougainvillea with hidden thorns beneath their fluffy pink blossoms.

  Eventually, Jillian decided her children needed the hour with me more than she did. A bit of color bloomed in her cheeks again, and the slightest hint of flesh reappeared on her boned-out body. While I worked with her children, Jillian propped herself in one of my gray waiting-room chairs and read her Bible. Always on time, always hovering over well-loved kids.

  On one particular Friday morning after I walked out of my treatment room after a session with Jacy, Jillian closed her Bible and said, “Katie, I am bone weary all the time. I mean truly bone weary from my schedule.” With her husband gone, Jillian had returned to work at the local hospital. “I just wanted to be a mom. I don’t like being a nurse. It was a profession I gladly walked away from when I married and had my babies.” She smiled at her kids.

  I glanced at them, reading their faces in a way I’d come to do after more than a decade in my field, and then I asked her to walk back in my treatment room with me. “I know how hard this is,” I said after closing the door. “But try not to say everything you’re thinking in front of the kids. They’re having a difficult time too.”

  “What are you saying? I am very careful—”

  “I know how much you love them. You don’t have to convince me of that. And, trust me, you’ll get used to your new schedule. It’ll get easier.”

  Jillian looked doubtful. “You promise?” She rubbed her back like a woman of eighty instead of forty.

  “I do. Jillian, be as positive as possible in front of your children.” Grieving mothers have no idea how the words they say impact their family. I knew she was still in shock. And, I grieved for her. But as a clinician, I had to be honest … because God had called me to this work. If I failed at it, I failed not just my patients. I failed Him.

  As the summer dragged on, Justin—sweet, nervous kid, with fidgety hands and quick tears always beneath the surface—learned two things. The first positive, and the second not.

  The first was that he was not his mother’s keeper or the head of his house. But new sorrow hacked its way into his pale face when he understood that a new apartment, affordable on one re-entry level nurse’s salary and one barely-within-range child-support check, portended his first summer without his horses.

  I kneeled on the emerald-green carpet stretched across my treatment-room floor, in front of this child who had already hurt too much. I cradled his small trembling hands in my larger ones. “The same God who has not forsaken you— and no, little one, He really has not—is big enough to look after your horses. And He knows your address at the tiny little apartment.”

  He didn’t say anything at first. Only stared at me. Then: “Why can’t pain come all at once?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Why didn’t pain kill me the first day I found my dad standing in the kitchen, with his head ducked and girl tears pouring down his face? His suitcase was already packed, and he had his Ford Ranger idling in the driveway. Since misery didn’t kill me the first day, why wasn’t I home free?” Justin’s eyes registered confusion not meant for someone twice his age. “I just knew he’d come back. Then I found out he wasn’t. Ever. Then I find out my parents are getting a divorce. A divorce. Now the house has a sign in the front yard.” He bit his lip. “Then somebody who I thought came by to help with the feeding and watering, looks over the horses and my mom tells me he made a good offer. A good offer would have been to help me out with the feeding and watering.”

  Oh, my twelve-year-old grown man.

  “But instead, he loaded up and drove away with my horses. I always fed them, but how can I feed ’em if I don’t have ’em?” Justin bit the knuckle of his index finger. “The hurting just won’t stop, Miss Katie.”

  “I know it feels like that right now.” The tension in my neck crawled down my spine, threatening to take my breath.

  “There’s no end to the suffering,” Justin said, “Mama telling me she won’t be there to fix breakfast anymore because she’s going back to work. And then I think, well at least we could afford the horses back. But, no, she told me, they’re gone forever, and we’re moving to an apartment close to the church. Moving means a new school and new friends or even no friends at all.”

  That day, unlike so many before, Justin didn’t throw words. He breathed them easy and pitiful into my ear as he folded against my body. “My God, my God, you have forsaken me.”

  “No,” I said as I gathered him and his gnawing pain in my arms. Had his father looked into his son’s swollen eyes? Did he know the hurt he left behind when he left for a younger woman? There had to be more to this story. One I’d never hear.

  What were some parents thinking?

  I knew what I thought. My deepest desire was to fulfill my divine purpose. God called me to help the “Justins” and “Jacys” who showed up at the clinic. I would help or die trying.

  In September, the frothy pink azaleas outside the clinic paled to a distant memory. Hot winds whipped hair across my face, and the humidity pasted it to the corners of my mouth. Jillian’s children—fragile but starting to smile and even laugh occasionally—hugged me goodbye for what I supposed to be a final time.

  Our sessions were over.

  But would they be okay? One hard thing about my work: I picked people up, guided them to acceptance, helped them smile again … even believe another life could be lived. Then they left … as they should. But never would I forget one of them. They couldn’t know the nights I spent in prayer for each because I knew children, if no one else, deserve to be ha
ppy. To have attentive parents.

  Even if I couldn’t have a baby of my own.

  The following March, the postman, smelling of sun-warmed skin and what may have possibly been English Leather—a scent hard to forget—dropped a bundled pile on my secretary’s desk shortly before lunch. My last patient for the morning had walked out only moments before, and Alicia and I were exchanging ideas about lunch.

  “See you later, ladies,” he said on his way out as I glanced through the mail. Psychology Today, Southern Living, a renewal notice for my license and liability insurance, and—tucked between them all—an angel-embossed envelope from Jillian Reynolds.

  Alicia pointed to it. “Looks personal,” she said.

  I ran my fingernail along the fold and opened the envelope, then slid the letter from inside.

  Katie,

  I hope this note finds you well and blessed. I couldn’t wait to tell you. I have met someone—well not just someone, a knight in shining armor, the man of my dreams, the answer to all our prayers. His name is Thomas.

  I want to thank you for all your help. I wouldn’t be where I am today without you. Please know that my life and the kids’ lives are going to be perfect again. Justin and Jacy are doing well and love Thomas as much as I do. We can’t wait to be a family. Anyway, I just had to tell you.

  May God bless you as you counsel others.

  In Christ’s name, Jillian.

  I wadded the paper—angels and all—into a tight little knot. I didn’t know Thomas, but I knew Jacy and Justin—and hundreds of other confused, aching kids trotting in their sneakers. They may love this new man in their lives, but they did not love him as much as Jillian did … or thought they did. In such a short time, so soon after her divorce. She couldn’t possibly know him enough to love him. Or to marry him, it sounded like.

  With all the hours I spent with her, my words had fallen on deaf ears. Helping her would have required that she listen.

  I walked back to my office, opened the top right desk drawer, and threw the letter in. Later, I’d press it flat. Later, I’d add it to their filed-away chart.

  Thumping started in my right temple. The prince would probably be forty or so, which meant Mr. Shining-armored Knight would have a history.

  And, he would probably have a kid of his own. Maybe two.

  I slid the drawer shut.

  Thump.

  Chapter 2

  Two years later

  Port Arthur is Janis Joplin country. The outcast-turned-rock-superstar took her first breaths here in the early 1940s. Attended the old Thomas Jefferson High School in the late 50s. There, she’d been bullied and belittled. There, she began to sing the blues …

  The sun’s glare seared the parking lot in front of my office to a simmering surface that would blister bare feet. “Me and Bobby McGee” played from a CD in my car’s sound system as I pulled into my customary parking spot under the tin-roofed carport outside my office. Odd really that I listened so often to Joplin, never being a fan of rock music. I liked gospel and country. But her story, not her music, hit at my soul, and I often wondered—what might have happened had she seen a good therapist instead of a poison-filled heroin needle.

  If only.

  The humidity grabbed hold like a sauna, slapping me in the face as I crawled from my car. The heaviness mirrored the feelings associated with pulling into this parking space most days. I loved being a family counselor, but I hated the mistreatment of the adults and children who came to see me. Oh, the wee ones.

  I had known when I opened the practice that children would walk through the doors. But I never once understood—until I waded in the deep end—that right here in the community where I lived, people broke the hearts and spirits of their kids.

  Every day.

  The very tots God had entrusted to their care. The worst-case scenario of man’s inhumanity to humanity.

  Yes. Everyone would remember Janis Joplin’s name—famous, soulful, tragic. But no one would know or remember the names of the precious ones I saw three days a week at my clinic—broken, confused, wanting.

  Walking around my car, the tension drummed in my neck. A pounding thumped in my chest. I ached all over from ever-present exhaustion. My body felt stiff as the stove pipes from my Alabama youth. Stove up, Papa used to call it.

  The sun cast a shadow in front of my body. A long, exaggerated version of me. I lingered to study it. Funny. It represented my career. Lots of sadness involved, but thank God, patterns of light and hope crouched at the edges. Were it not for the hope, the patches of light, I would walk away from the clinic today. I’d rip down my shingle—the one that said Catherine Collier, LPC—and fling it in my BMW’s trunk, and my shadow and I would drive far, far away.

  “Someday,” I whispered into the thick air. Someday, I would stop seeing children. Someday … But that day those kids waited for me inside.

  Taking long strides across the clinic’s back porch, I wondered about all those women I imagined filling my client roster with when I ground my way through graduate school. Positive I would see women who were divorced and lonely or married and angry or single and depressed. Instead, these women send me their kids.

  And I loved them. Their stories and their brokenness made me forget to eat, kept me awake at night, and my knees calloused from prayer. Compared to staring into the eyes of a child who has been abandoned, beaten or deprived, humiliated or molested, and being expected to have a solution that will heal her, counseling almost any adult is a stroll in a spring-time garden.

  I pulled three dead leaves off my potted ivy starting to crawl onto the black wrought iron stair rail. Inhaled deeply. Then I grabbed the handle of the back-glass door uttering the same prayer I prayed every time I entered that building: “Lord, give me the wisdom today to listen to people through your ears. Let me help those in need of counsel. Lord, anyone I can’t help, please don’t let me hurt.” I stepped into the hallway of my other home, the place where I could indulge my Victorian flair without choking my husband senseless with flowers and lace.

  I peeked in and smiled at the first room on the right coming in through the backdoor—the treatment room. Immaculately over frou-frou’d. A mulberry-scented candle set atop an antique sideboard with a rounded front that reminded me of a child with a belly full of watermelon. Alicia had already placed my new-client chart on the green velvet rocking recliner. Not that I ever reclined, but I rocked a lot as I listened to hearts break.

  The room beckoned me inside, as it always had. I laid my hand on my chair back. A sofa stretched under the large bank of windows facing it. A matching wingback chair—the one I’d picked up for a song—perched to my left where my entire academic career stood on display above it, all captured in time by navy mats and gold frames.

  A sink built into a walnut vanity stood against the wall opposite the sofa— just behind my chair—where I could reach it.

  “Hey.”

  I recognized Alicia’s voice behind me.

  “I thought I heard you come in.”

  I smiled before turning to her.

  She grinned. Alicia always grinned. She always grinned, and she always asked questions, and she rarely waited on the answers. She shook her head, and dark hair swung around her face as she greeted me. “Ya ready for your new little one? How did class go?” Alicia crossed her arms, leaning all ninety-four pounds of herself against the doorframe. “You hungry? I bet you’re not hungry yet.” She shook her head no for me. “Let me know when you are. You coming up front since he’s new?” She cocked one brow. “Or you want me to send ’em on back? His name is Billy. He’s four. Cute little thing.” Her grin widened as she hunched her shoulders up near her ears. “Everybody’s cute when they’re four, though. He’s with his mama. She knows you. Took your psychology class at the university.”

  She rattled like a ’62 Chevy. Her style of conversation: one long run-on sentence.

  I smiled. Gosh, I loved her.

  I reached to sweep the chart off my chair. �
�Who’s his mother?” I almost never forgot a student.

  “Cindy Thibbodeaux,” Alicia answered before I could read it from the chart.

  “Long-long hair?”

  “Yep, that’s her. She called here last week and made an appointment. I mailed her the paperwork.” She nodded toward the chart. “It’s there in his folder, coffee stained and reeking of tobacco. Oh, and Kat. Jordan called and needs a callback.”

  “Okay.” I scanned the smudged form for name and age and then skipped to the bottom of the second page for the most important information: State your reason for a visit to the counseling center. Cindy scrawled on the bottom of the intake form: I believe my son is attention deficit. He is hyperactive. He drives me nuts.

  “I’ll come up,” I mumbled to Alicia, still reading. She ducked out of the room and headed back toward the front. I followed behind her, walking slowly, still scoping the form. I recognized Cindy immediately, but I didn’t know Billy. Cute, but rumpled and dirty. He sported scraps from some unidentifiable breakfast on his shirt and chin. His unwashed face showed marks from sleep, and his hair stuck up in all the wrong places. It looked like the few hairs laying down had probably been plastered with Cindy’s spit. Billy’s stained shirt, an orange jacket, knee-length shorts and cowboy boots that slapped when he walked because the soles were no longer fully attached completed his outfit.

  A jacket and cowboy boots in this heat? His version of a favored blanket or teddy bear, no doubt.

  Cindy, surrounded by what looked like the contents of a small house, grabbed awkwardly at nothing but aimed in the general direction of Billy, who was oblivious to her. I watched her unsuccessful attempts to rein him in to stand beside her. Cindy struggled under the weight of a second child, incredibly too large to be in the carrier she had her strapped into. She looked like a fat finger wearing a flesh-biting wedding ring. Cindy’s balancing act included her purse and diaper bag, her cigarettes and lighter, and a stainless-steel coffee mug. I’m sure I have walked into the foyer amid goofier scenarios, but at that minute, I just couldn’t think of one to save my life.