Then Came You (36 page)

Darren picked up his glasses off the coffee table, put them on, and looked at me defiantly. “You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“It’s like...” He scratched at his head some more, thinking. “A preexisting condition,” he finally said. “I’ll deal with it. Whatever it is.” He opened his arms. “Now come to papa.”

And, almost in spite of myself, I went.

W
hen I was seventeen, my junior year of high school, my grandfather had a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side.

My yaya tried to find the right kind of facility, a place with round-the-clock nurses and physical therapy, and aides who could help lift my grandfather from his bed to his wheelchair, then from the chair to the toilet or the shower. But insurance only paid for six months at a place like that. When the time was up, my grandfather came home, where he’d fly into rages, face red, spittle in the corners of his lips, glaring at my grandmother in frustration, or in tears.
Why can’t, why can’t,
was the phrase he’d repeat over and over, as she’d tell him, in Greek and in English,
Vassily, calm down!
He couldn’t be left alone: unattended, he’d throw things, start fires when he turned on the stove and then forgot about it.

For six weeks we managed. In the mornings, we’d work together to get him to the bathroom, shaved and dressed and into his chair. My grandmother would stay with him while I was at school. I turned down my starring role in the drama club’s fall musical so I could come home as soon as school ended. I’d sit with him, watching television or reading out loud while she ran errands or napped. We’d eat dinner early, perform the bathroom
routine again, and then watch TV until it was time to get him in bed. We kept this up until the morning my grandfather fell on top of my grandmother while I was at school. After an hour, she managed to work herself out from underneath him (my grandfather was almost six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds) and inch her way across the kitchen floor to the phone. The ambulance she called took them both to the hospital. She’d cracked three of her ribs and he’d broken a hip.

“I don’t want to do this,” Yaya said, wincing as she spoke and pressing her hand against her taped-up ribs. “But I have no choice.” She put the house up for sale, moved the two of them into an assisted-living complex where no one under fifty-five was allowed, and gave me the last address she had for my mother, on Alden Lane in New London, Connecticut.
Sure,
Raine had said, when Yaya had called her.
Sure, Sammie can come. Absolutely. It’s time we were together.
But I’d been listening on the extension, and my mother had not sounded enthusiastic. I could hear noises in the background—kids fighting, a television blaring, a man yelling something I couldn’t make out. She’d gotten married years ago, to a man named Phil, and they had two daughters, ages seven and five. She had never ended up in California—New London was about as far away from there as you could get.

I left Toledo in October with five hundred dollars, a suitcase full of clothes, a pair of boots and a pair of sneakers, and a winter coat that I’d outgrown (I hadn’t wanted to bother Yaya and ask for another one). In spite of all the indications, I was hopeful. I hadn’t seen my mother in years, but I remembered her as young and beautiful, always laughing, with a light in her eyes, so different from my dour, exhausted grandmother.

But the woman who opened the door after my ten-hour bus ride was different. I blinked, thinking maybe I’d gotten the address wrong, looking at the woman’s hard-worn face and faded
eyes, her hair dyed a brassy, straw-like blonde, and her body still thin, but soft as overripe fruit.

“Sammie?” Her voice was hoarse. There was a cigarette burning between her fingers, and I could see that her teeth were stained. I wondered if she still had the unicorn tattooed on her hip, if she remembered telling me she’d take me to California, and if she ever felt bad that she hadn’t.

Her husband wasn’t there. Phil was, I learned, a long-distance trucker who made cross-country runs that kept him on the road ten days out of every two weeks. Raine worked, part-time, as a cashier at a supermarket. “This is going to be just fine,” she said, ushering me into the house, which smelled like bacon grease and cigarette smoke, showing me the pullout couch where I’d sleep and the closet where I could keep my things. It probably did seem like a good deal to her: a built-in, live-in babysitter for her daughters from the moment I came home from school. Usually, she’d barely bother to say hello to me as I got off the bus before racing out the door, into her car, and, I eventually learned, off to one of the Indian casinos just a few miles up the highway.

The girls—Emmie and Sophie—were sweet enough, with big brown eyes and curly brown hair. I’d babysat some, back in Toledo, and I liked kids all right. I’d walk them home from their elementary school, help them hang up their backpacks, and fix them a snack. We’d play games: Veterinarian, where we’d treat Sophie’s ailing teddy bears; Doctor, where I’d pretend that my leg hurt and the girls, giggling, would decide that the only remedy was an immediate amputation. We’d play Sorry and Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, and then, at five o’clock, watch
Sesame Street.
At six, I’d fix them dinners of macaroni and cheese or hot dogs and sweet pickles. I’d give them their baths and put them to bed before starting on my own homework. It wasn’t perfect, and Raine was not what I’d expected or hoped for, but
I could get through it until I finished high school and figured out my next move.

The first time my stepfather crawled into bed with me he said it was a mistake. He explained this to me over breakfast the next morning, clutching his coffee cup, looking straight into my eyes. “Sometimes, when I’m coming in late, your mom makes up that pullout bed for me. When I saw the bed made up, that’s what I thought. I didn’t even notice you there.” He smiled. His teeth were worse than Raine’s had gotten. “Skinny little thing like you.”

Phil was a lean, bald man with crinkles in the corners of his muddy brown eyes. He smelled like the tobacco he chewed, and when he came home after ten days away, he pushed his daughters away like they were pigs swarming at a trough.
Run upstairs now. Let Daddy talk to your big sister,
he’d say, with his eyes moving over me, like I was another cheap piece of furniture filling his living room, something he’d bought and paid for.

The second time he slapped his hand over my mouth and ripped off my panties before I kneed him in the stomach and wriggled away. Standing on the edge of the bed, panting, my nose running, and my knee bruised from the metal bar on the side of the bed, I’d yelled at him, loud enough that there was no way my mother could not have heard:
If you touch me again, you fucking bastard, I swear to God I’ll cut it off.
He’d rolled off me and staggered away, clutching himself. Raine never came to my rescue. She never came at all.

The next morning, my mother, holding her cigarettes in one hand and her lighter in the other, sat me down at the breakfast table and mumbled, “I don’t think this is going to work.”

I sat there, hardly believing what I was hearing. I’d told her what had happened, but she didn’t believe me . . . or, worse, maybe she did believe me, and she was taking his side anyhow.

“Phil’s got a bad temper, but I know he didn’t mean anything.”

My voice sounded like it was coming from outer space. “He put his hand down my underpants. I’m pretty sure he knew what that meant.”

Raine winced, then lit a cigarette. “He got confused,” she said weakly. Then she glared at me. “And it’s not like he asked for another kid. A teenager, for God’s sake. He’s got his hands full, you know.”

“So where am I supposed to go?”

She didn’t answer. I got to my feet, picked up my bookbag, then pulled my suitcase out of the closet and started to fill it with the few things I’d brought with me from Ohio.
Stop me,
I thought.
Tell me you love me, tell me to stay.
She didn’t. Instead, she gave me the keys to her car, an ancient Tercel. “Maybe you can stay with some friends for a while. Like a sleepover.” I didn’t tell her that sleepovers were for little girls; that I hadn’t been at New London High School long enough to make any friends, and I couldn’t go back to Toledo. How could I tell people that my own mother hadn’t wanted me, that, between the two of us, she’d chosen Phil?

I spent three nights at the Days Inn and then, realizing that I couldn’t pay for a fourth night, I started sleeping in Raine’s car, which I parked in the far reaches of the high school’s lot. I’d catch a few fitful hours of rest each night curled under piles of clothing in the backseat, praying that no one would find me. Salvation arrived just before Thanksgiving, in my theater class.

I’d signed up for theater because I’d loved it back home, where my voice and my looks had gotten me plum parts in every musical. In New London, the teacher was Mrs. Rusk, a sixty-year-old battle-axe with dyed red hair and the requisite complement of oversized gestures and affectations, but she’d taken
medical leave in late October after her breast cancer came back. She left, bidding us a teary farewell and quoting King Lear’s speech to his daughters, on a Friday. On Monday morning, after Raine had kicked me out, I took my seat in the school’s theater and sat, transfixed, as a man stepped out of the wings and onto the stage, then beckoned for us to join him.

“Might as well get comfortable up here,” he said. “Names?” We went around a circle, saying our names, listening as he repeated them.

David Carter was in his thirties, still good-looking enough that the girls would check him out when he stood onstage to deliver a monologue, or ran lines with us, playing Romeo to our Juliet, Stanley to our Blanche.

He’d gone to New London High, then NYU. He’d been the understudy for the Phantom, and acted in an off-Broadway revival of
A Streetcar Named Desire.
He kept a coffeepot plugged in on his desk—against school rules, probably, but a theater instructor, an actor, could get away with certain eccentricities. In the mornings, he’d pour me a cup—half scalding black coffee, half cream—and I’d hold it gratefully, letting the mug warm my skin. I wasn’t sure if he knew that I hadn’t had breakfast and, most days, I hadn’t had dinner, either, but those cups of milky coffee were the first of many kindnesses.

Being homeless as a teenager wasn’t as hard as it probably was for adults who didn’t have access to a high school. I’d get to school early, ostensibly to use the gym, and I’d shower in the locker room and brush my teeth at the sink. I could wash my clothes at the Laundromat. I was probably eligible for free lunches, had Raine taken the time to apply, but there was always food around the school, if you knew where to look for it: leftover birthday cake in the teachers’ lounge, bags of pretzels that the anorexics-in-training would toss, still mostly full, into the trash bins in the girls’ rooms. I’d pocket apples and bananas and jars
of peanut butter at the grocery store, and slip string cheese and packages of crackers and gum into my pockets at the gas station.

The tricky part was finding a safe place to spend the nights. I’d rotate my spots, moving from the parking lot at the high school to the one behind the public library to the one at the Y. Twice, in the middle of the night, once at the high school and once at the end of a dirt road, the cops had pulled up, shining their lights through the Tercel’s windows. It had been a different cop each time, but I’d told them both the same story: that I’d had a fight with my mother.

“Go on home,” said the officer who’d found me the last time. “Whatever they did to you, no matter how mad they are, your folks wouldn’t want you sleeping out here alone. It’s not safe.”

In November, I came to class one day to find a winter coat, brand-new, pink nylon with a pale-pink lining, hanging from the back of my chair. “I bought it for my sister, but she didn’t like it. On sale, so it can’t go back. Can you use it?” David asked. Later, I learned that he didn’t have a sister. He’d seen me shivering in the parking lot wearing both of my sweaters at once, and had guessed, correctly, that I didn’t have a coat.

It took him weeks to earn my trust, weeks of treats and compliments: a waxed paper bag of doughnuts waiting on my chair, a coupon for buy-one-get-one-free pizza from the shop in town tucked into my
Ten Monologues
book, a sweater that he told me he’d shrunk in the wash. Later, he said that getting me to talk was like coaxing a feral cat in from the cold.
Little Cat,
he called me, and he told me that he’d loved me the first time he’d seen me, all legs and big eyes, “and those tights you had, remember them? The ones with the hole in the knee.”

He never touched me for all that time, except for a light hand on my wrist or the small of my back when he was directing a scene . . . but, the way he looked at me, I knew there were possibilities. I had just turned eighteen, had only had a few
boyfriends, and was still learning my own power, the way boys would follow me with their eyes, the things I could get them to do. Now I was starting to wonder whether a man might be the answer to my problems.

One night at the end of November, when it was getting dark by four-thirty p.m. and the nights were getting cold, I walked to David’s classroom and leaned against the door. I wore a thin white blouse, my ripped black tights, a black Spandex skirt that ended at the tops of my thighs, the Doc Martens I’d convinced Yaya to buy me the year before. He looked at me and his face lit up, and I knew that the thing I wanted—a warm place to sleep, an actual bed—was mine for the taking.

So I stood in the classroom doorway, each rib visible underneath my skin and my nipples poking out against my shirt, and I let him take me to his place, an apartment that took up the whole second floor of an old Victorian downtown. There, I let him give me half a glass of tart red wine and then, by the flickering light of a half-dozen candles, I undressed myself while he stared up at me from his bed and lay on top of him and kissed him until he groaned and rolled on top of me, taking me in his arms. Three weeks after the first time we’d slept together, he resigned from the school. No big deal, he told me; he had a little family money. The next day we drove to a justice of the peace after school on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, and became man and wife.