Redemption (13 page)

I was shocked to hear those words. I would’ve been less hurt if she’d taken a steak knife and cut me up with it.

I didn’t speak to her for a long time after that. Mom knew what had happened. She knew I hadn’t handed Christy the key. She knew Christy had blackmailed me into driving her car. She knew Christy had caused the wreckage. I knew I hadn’t done the right thing, but I couldn’t understand how my own mother could stand up in front of a judge and make matters worse for me. Or maybe I could, considering everything else.

The judge had a surprised look on his face. I don’t think he believed what he had heard either. At least his punishment was pretty light. Both of us had to go to a juvenile detention facility for a tour. They left us in a cell for a couple of hours to scare us, and then they let us go. Mom was fined $1,000 in court fees that Dad ended up paying. He called me Crash and Burn for a long time after that.

Meanwhile, Mom grounded me. I thought,
Big deal
. We were living out in the middle of nowhere in Highland, so there wasn’t much to do anyway. The worst part of the whole ordeal was the spanking she gave me.

Then she moved to Arizona with Frank, and I obviously wasn’t going anywhere with that sorry sack of crap. I went back to Dad’s (Rosa was staying there) while Christy went to live with Grandma and Grandpa Paulson. Mom thought her dad had changed his ways. She wasn’t worried about him molesting Christy because, according to family rumor, Grandpa had never touched Aunt Deanna. I don’t know whether he did touch Christy; she never said he did. But I do know she hated living with them. They were stern and strict, and she was about as carefree as they come. Before long, she moved in with Aunt Deanna.

Dad became only more pissed about Frank.
Pissed
. He talked about how much he hated Mom and Frank all the time. If Dad picked up the phone when Mom called for me, he’d yell, “Stacey, the slut’s on the phone for you.”

She didn’t argue with him anymore at that point. She just let him insult her. What could she say? Nothing would make him stop. Plus, she’d run off with his best friend from college. Even I knew that people weren’t supposed to do things like that to each other. Something just seemed wrong with her.

Our parents kept moving us back and forth, and we felt like nobody wanted us. The truth was, nobody did. They always told us we could choose where we wanted to live, but neither of them lobbied to get us. Christy had to do the merry-go-round more than I did. She never knew where she’d be sleeping. I always got sent back to Dad. I didn’t want to go, but at least he showed an interest in me when no one else did. So I lived with Dad and Rosa down in Soulard for about six months. I wasn’t scared of living with him because I’d done it before. I knew how to be compliant, and I knew how to make the situation work. The rules were simple: if you fought with Dad, you wouldn’t win. So I didn’t fight. Besides, I was happy that Rosa was going to be there to sleep with him.

Rosa didn’t know how to be compliant with Dad. She yelled back when he went into his alcoholic rages. She didn’t know that the best thing to do was to run away and hide. So they’d get into screaming matches, and he punched holes in the walls. But even those times eased my worries. At least he was flying off the handle at her and not at me. I was thankful for the break.

Rosa didn’t know how to get along with me either because I was still a klepto, getting into her jewelry and other belongings.

We had a big blow-up. I defended myself and lied until my face turned blue. She told me I needed to act right, but I didn’t know what right was anymore. She started to resent me because I caused problems.

She also resented me because Dad said things to me in front of her. Things like, “Rosa will leave us just like your mother did.” He often sided with me in arguments, and she’d tell him to choose between her and me. He told her no one would ever tell him what to do.

Dad did listen to her on one point. She insisted Dad take me to another psychologist. But I thought,
The first one didn’t fix me, so what’s the second one going to do?

I felt like I lived alone—and in a terrible neighborhood. We rented a three-story red brick townhouse, and some of the nearby homes were boarded up. I was scared. People outside on the streets looked hungry, like they might use a pocketknife to steal my lunch. This part of town was so bad that I couldn’t attend the public school safely, so Dad enrolled me in a private Catholic school called St. Elizabeth’s Academy. That was the expensive school that Rosa’s daughter attended.

I got on the city bus every day by myself wearing my plaid school uniform. I was the youngest rider by far, and I couldn’t have looked more out of place. As the faces became more familiar, though, I started to feel safer. People on that bus route were very nice to me. Maybe they had sympathy for the lone thirteen-year-old. I rode the same bus home on my bus pass. I didn’t ask Dad for a ride anywhere.

He wasn’t home to give me a ride anyway. He was always at work, at the bar, or out with Rosa into the late hours of the night. There were bars on every corner—Soulard was one big drinking hole—and he and Rosa frequented all of them. When I wasn’t hiding out on the third floor of our place, I was out walking around. I used to go to the farmer’s market to see the live chickens they sold there. For dinner, I’d head to the gas station on the corner for a packaged sandwich, or just go to McDonald’s. I strolled all over Soulard, safe or not, because there was nothing else to do.

All of the nothingness got to me.

One night, Rosa accused me of drinking a glass of beer that was left on the table. She was steamed about it. This was my last straw. I wasn’t into drinking, and I hadn’t touched any damn beer. I told her so. I was just really unhappy. I hated the all-girls school. I had no friends. I couldn’t keep track of where my sister was living. My mom had taken off with some slimeball who hit on me. Life sucked.

And my dad was still coming for me sometimes.

A fight with Rosa was all I needed that night to send me over yet another ledge.

I went upstairs, as usual, to eat in my room alone. I had an orange and a paring knife.

This is it
, I thought.
I can do something now. I can end this
. No one was there to bother me. Rosa never came up to the third floor, and who knew where Dad was or when he would be coming home.

I intended to slit my wrists. I had no idea that committing suicide required an actual razor blade; that it was very hard to do with a dull kitchen knife. I just believed what I’d seen on dramatic shows like
Dallas
, where women killed themselves often, and made dying look easy. Dying seemed way better than living my life, so I tried to cut across the width of my flesh, across the blue veins. It hurt, and I didn’t even break the skin. I sawed some more. Still not a drop of blood, just more red, raw, inflamed skin. I wasn’t sadistic or anything—the paring knife clearly wasn’t going to work. After fifteen minutes, I stopped trying because it hurt too much.

I felt disappointed. I’d have to keep on living, and I didn’t know if I could. Overwhelmingly, I also felt stupid. I wasn’t even smart enough to commit suicide right.

While I was miserable with Dad in Soulard, Mom had been miserable in Arizona. She had finally opened her eyes to see that Frank was just another alcoholic asshole. She was living in Highland again—alone.

The next day, I ran into Dad in the kitchen, and he immediately noticed my wrists. He told me he knew this was the second time I’d tried to commit suicide in six months. He seemed concerned.

“This isn’t working,” he told me. He wasn’t mad or anything. He was worried and sad. He was being my daddy, not Tom. I needed a daddy, but I was slowly coming to the realization that I didn’t have one. Still, I clung to the slightest bit of hope that the good side of Dad would come back. Maybe it would one day. Maybe he would walk through the door and be the daddy I had loved so much back in Cedar Rapids. That could happen, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

“I want you safe,” he added. “So I’m going to send you to your mom’s. I don’t know what to do for you, and I don’t think I’m the right thing.”

The right thing didn’t exist, but I didn’t dare say that. Instead, I went upstairs to pack what little stuff I had. I was at Mom’s later that day.

My disappointment mounted. Sure, Mom’s apartment was safer than Dad’s, but it was every bit as toxic. I had only one thing to look forward to: I’d get to live with Christy again. I just hoped she wasn’t too messed up. Aunt Deanna hadn’t been the greatest parent while Mom was gone. Christy had been slacking in her schoolwork, and sometimes she just skipped it altogether. She was eleven years old.

Christy was feisty and mouthy. She mouthed off to me like it was her job, and I really couldn’t blame her. When she had to visit Dad, for example, he’d always leave and put me in charge. So I’d take care of her and discipline her. It was weird to relate to her like a parent when we were only two years apart. But Mom had the same expectations. Christy felt like I bossed her around and made her do too much housework.

When Mom wasn’t around, Christy had no problem telling me, “Fuck off and leave me alone.”

I didn’t fight with her that much because I understood where her attitude came from. I tried to smooth things out and make the best of our situation. Christy had a lot of fight in her that I didn’t have. She wasn’t scared of other kids or people or our parents. I wanted to keep the peace at all times, and she was hell-bent on disrupting it.

I always thought she was strong because she would take risks. She had spirit, and I felt like mine had been beaten down. Even though we had it out often, I loved her, and I loved living with her again during my freshman and sophomore years.

Last Laugh

rank was madly in love with my mother, and he was enraged when she broke up with him. His mother owned a successful rental company, and she had been supporting them financially in Arizona. I don’t know all of the details; I just know Frank called begging for Mom to come back to him. She wanted no part of him. Frank’s mother was in contact with us, too. I opened a letter that she wrote to Mom. Basically, it said:

I’m wondering why you left Frank, and I want to know if it was because of his drinking
.

I had her name and return address, so I looked her up in the phone book and called her. I needed someone to listen—someone to believe in me. I had told Mom what Frank said to me, but she brushed it off.

“Frank didn’t mean it, he only said that to hurt me,” Mom told me. I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t take me seriously. I was used to being disappointed.

I called Frank’s mother, told her who I was, and I said, “I am thirteen years old, and my mother would never tell you this, but Frank hit on me. He said he couldn’t wait to tickle my womb.”

“Are you sure that’s what he said?” the old lady asked me.

“Yes.”

“Thank you for telling me,” she replied, hanging up. After that, Frank’s mother cut him off financially.

A few weeks later, Frank was so mad that he came looking for me with a gun. I couldn’t go out of the apartment because he had called. He told me he was going to kill me.

I was scared. But more than that, I was secretly validated. Finally, someone—a person who didn’t even know me—believed what had happened to me. Someone had done something on my behalf.

On the other hand, it also seemed that telling the truth can get you killed.

Grandpa Paulson came over and sat on Mom’s porch with a shotgun in his hand to protect me. Grandpa would’ve blown Frank’s head off if he had set foot near our property. Grandpa was like that. Nobody hurt his flock without suffering the consequences. He could hurt his family all day long, but by God, no one else could.

I heard Grandpa say, “If anyone hurts you, I’m taking him down.” He waited all day, and he got ruffled up only one time when Frank came around the block in his car. Frank saw my grandfather, took note of the shotgun, and my mother’s ex boyfriend never showed his face again.

One weekend, Christy and I were staying at Dad’s. Rosa had moved out, but they had decided to continue dating. I literally couldn’t get out of bed because of what felt like knives stabbing me in the abdomen. Dad was attentive to me this time, maybe because deep in his heart, he knew my medical problems might be the result of something he had done. He lifted me out of bed to his car and drove me to the children’s hospital. In the emergency room, a doctor told me I had cysts on my ovaries, and my specific problem was cystic ovarian pain. The words terrified me—I dreamed of getting married and having kids one day. I didn’t know what it all meant. The doctor just gave me medicine and referred me to a gynecologist.

Dad took me to my appointment; Mom didn’t come. I told the gynecologist that I was sexually active, which nearly killed me. In my mind, I was still a virgin because what happened with my father couldn’t possibly count. But it was what it was, and I couldn’t hide. I chose to say I’d had sex because the pain was awful, and I figured she’d be able to tell anyway. She didn’t ask for any more information than that.

She sent me home with prescriptions, and Dad told me to take them. He took care of me when I was sick this time. It was my mom who seemed to know nothing about it.

Mom lived in an apartment over the town square in Highland, near Alhambra. Most of the burnout kids hung out at the pavilion right in front of our apartment, which was over the music store. I would go outside and hang around, tentatively at first. I wasn’t in their social circle, but then again, I wasn’t in any social group yet since I’d just switched schools again, to Highland High School. I was reconnecting with old friends while trying to make some new ones. This new crew smoked a lot of cigarettes, and I started doing it sometimes, too. Aunt Deanna had taught me how when I was eight years old. She would make me light up with her, so I couldn’t tattle on her.

A boy named Jake seemed to be the leader of the burnouts. He was tall, lanky, and beautiful in a first-crush kind of way. I’d gone to grade school with him in Alhambra, and we had ridden the same country bus home from school every day. We didn’t really speak then because he was two years older.

By this time, I was fourteen, and he was sixteen. The group of kids were freshmen like me, but he was a junior with a car. Everyone, myself included, looked up to him with reverence. We hoped to be as cool as he was in a few years. Jake was godlike in that he gave us freedom. He would load us up in his turquoise 1960 Chevy Bel Air and take us wherever we wanted to go. We could stuff up to eight teenagers in that thing.

He started coming around the square more often. One of the other guys I was kind of friends with, Chris, told me Jake liked me. My heart beat faster.

“Really?” I asked. I thought maybe Chris was making a mistake. Surely he meant another Stacey.

Chris told me not to be scared. Jake said he knew I was younger, and he wouldn’t have any expectations. Jake would be gentle with me. He just wanted to go out and make me feel safe.

I asked my mom if I could go on a date with Jake. I was not allowed to ride in cars with boys, not when she knew about it anyway, but I could walk to the movie theater with him. She finally agreed to let him pick me up in his car on the way to school, and that was cool. He’d come into the apartment and spend time with Mom, slowly winning her over.

He’d already won me over. I was in love for the first time. Jake was my world.

Mom didn’t approve of my crush, and she said she didn’t want us to become serious. She told me I was too young, he was too old, and there was too much trouble we could get into. That’s exactly the kind of adult talk that makes teenagers want to kiss in dark alleyways.

Jake gave me his aquamarine class ring, and my infatuation reached new highs. So it would fit my finger, I wrapped it in embroidery floss instead of yarn with a glossy coat of clear nail polish. I’d get fancy with it, sometimes wrapping two or three colors of floss in an alternating pattern. I had plenty of time to do this while Jake was working as a busboy at a nearby restaurant. I was careful to hide his ring from my mother.

Mom was also dating a guy who worked at a local resort. His name was Bear, and he was big and sweet. I liked him. He invited us to go swimming at the resort with him. I was so excited about our fun day that I got sloppy—when Christy and I got in her car, Mom saw the ring I had accidentally left on.

“Are you and Jake going steady?” she asked, looking cute in her romper with a swimming suit underneath. She still drove the Cutlass we had crashed into the barns.

I wasn’t backing down on this one. My mom’s string of boyfriends gave her no right to rag on mine. I looked her square in the eye and said, “Yes.” I was all geared up.

“Give it back,” she said. “You’re not even supposed to see him that much.”

“No way,” I replied, turning up the attitude. “If you want me to take off the ring, quit your job, stay home, and follow me around.” I talked to her like that all the time, trying to give her a hard time. She didn’t have anything to say back to me. She could ground and spank me all she wanted, but she knew I’d sneak out the windows if that’s what it took to see Jake. Usually, though, I could just use the door because Mom was hardly ever home, and she knew it. Instead of putting up a fight, she conceded. She started letting me go out with Jake—even in his car.

I was too charmed to see Jake’s faults. He wanted sex, but he had agreed to wait, so I didn’t feel much pressure. He was also a drifter, hanging out with various social groups. That didn’t strike me as strange at the time because I drifted, too. I just wasn’t as popular as he was. I didn’t know or care what made him so well liked.

Then one day, Mom asked me, “Does Jake sell drugs?”

“What? No!” I was appalled. I couldn’t believe she’d accuse him of something awful like that. Sure, I’d seen him smoke a joint, but all the kids out in the pavilion did that. They didn’t pressure me about it; they knew I wasn’t into weed. I was the straight-edge girl on the track team, and I didn’t want to screw that up.

I saw Jake later that night and asked him. He threw his head back and laughed at me. Then I had to decide whether to stay with a pot smoker. I chose to stay.

Our relationship stayed fun and easygoing for about three months. Then one day I was waiting for Jake with that group of teenagers down by his car. He would park near the pavilion for work so I could kiss him hello and good-bye as he came and went.

One day, there was another girl waiting for Jake by his car. I asked her what was going on. She told me her name was Anita Green and that she and Jake were dating.

“That’s impossible, I’ve got his ring,” I said. Surely, this was all just a misunderstanding. Jake wouldn’t do anything like that to me.

She saw the ring and became really upset. The pain on her face was proof enough that she wasn’t lying. “He told me his mother wouldn’t let him give it out,” Anita said. She was taller than me, with acne and large hips, and probably a little older, too.

I asked her if she had slept with him. She said she had. I was crushed. I hadn’t had sex with Jake yet. He told me he loved me enough to wait. He respected the fact that I was a good girl—or at least I was trying to be.

I asked Jake about Anita later that night, and he fessed up to seeing her. I was heartbroken. I hated him and loved him. But I did what I was supposed to do: I broke up with Jake. I cried for days. Finally, I asked Mom for advice.

I told her Jake had cheated on me with another girl, but he wanted me back. “What should I do?”

“If you love him, go back to him,” she said on a weeknight when she was home from work. “You’re old enough to make your own choices about what you want and what you don’t want. So if you forgive him, go back to him.”

We had study hall together, and I’d see him passing notes back and forth with this cute girl named Judy. That tore me up. That’s when I told him I missed him and loved him. He said he missed me, too. We wound up getting back together, though things were never the same.

At that point in our relationship, I thought I had to have sex if I wanted to keep him. So I waited for a night when I had just started my period to sleep with Jake for the first time. I knew there was supposed to be blood when a girl lost her virginity, and I wanted him to believe he was my first. To me, he was. I was so afraid he’d be able to tell something was wrong with me. I was worrying for nothing, though. Jake did not care about anything technical—he was a seventeen-year-old boy, and he just wanted to get laid. We had a sexual relationship for a long time. It ended when we both cheated on each other. The breakup was long and painful. I never should have gotten back together with him.

I had a hard time getting over Jake, even when he was awful to me. One day, I came home from track practice to find my sister passed out in the bathroom. I shook her until she opened her eyes. She told me she had smoked pot, and Jake had given it to her. I had just turned fifteen, and she was only thirteen. I was furious.

Mom was going to be home in a few hours, and I had no idea what was happening to Christy. She kept laughing and noodling around the room. I was afraid I’d get in trouble because she was acting like a fool. Also, I didn’t know if she was going to be okay. How was she feeling? I was pissed and nervous and scared all at the same time.

I ran down to the square and asked the kids if they had seen Jake. I found out he had left a while ago. I asked Chris if he had any weed.

He laughed and said, “You don’t smoke, why do you want it?”

“If Christy is high, I need to get high, too.” Then he really laughed. I was freaking out. But he found me some, and one of the kids showed me what to do with it. I found out exactly how Christy felt. I was scared at first because Mom once told me she’d seen white horses the first time she smoked. I guess I was lucky—I didn’t see any wild animals. I just relaxed and stopped worrying about Jake and Christy and my mom and everything. It was great. I shed all of the anxiety, fear, and pain by breathing in deeply. Where had pot been all my life? I was loving it.

I went back upstairs to goof around with Christy. We were fine by the time Mom got home, and she didn’t notice a thing. Not that she would have anyway; she didn’t pay that much attention to us.

Eventually, I told Jake I was furious with him for preying on my sister, and I also told him something else: I thought I was pregnant. I hadn’t had my period, and my belly was swollen. He wasn’t nice to me; he wasn’t even concerned. Instead, we broke up for good—no more messing around. Then he pretty much stabbed me in the back. I don’t know why he did this, but he told the whole school I was having a baby. As if that weren’t cruel enough, he also spread the rumor that I was a “dead fuck.”

Maybe he was just being a stupid teenager. It was hard to think that this boy I had loved so much could obliterate me so easily. I knew too well that males could break my heart. But Jake’s words and actions took me by surprise, devastating me. I cried and avoided all my old friends. I got my period shortly after that—thank God, because I wouldn’t have known whether the baby was Jake’s or my father’s.