Redemption (19 page)

Unhappy Birthday

had hoped to put Christy on a plane straight to Mom’s when I got home. I would use Dad’s credit card for the plane ticket if I had to, and pay him back. I’d find a way.

But that’s not how things went down. Christy refused to go to Mom’s. And anyway, Mom said she wasn’t ready for Christy yet. Mom needed some time between daughters. Mom was so clueless then. The alcoholic she had divorced was a saint compared to the alcoholic we were stuck with.

Christy hated our father. She hoped everyone would die—Dad, Deanna, John, our grandparents, and most of all, our mother. Like me, she blamed Mom for things Mom didn’t even know she’d done. She hated the world and everything in it.

I was the only person related to Christy that she didn’t hate. She had friends, but they weren’t going to make sure she ate breakfast and got home safely at night. She could count on me—and only me. I wanted to take care of her, and to help make things better for her. I took responsibility for my younger sister—God knows, no one else did.

Dad was a prick when I came back—not that I was surprised. He’d stayed on his steady path of decline since Grandma Lannert had died. He drank more—as if that were possible—and he was meaner. But his anger wasn’t contingent on how much alcohol he consumed; he was volatile all the time. Moments of peace were rare. He seemed the worse for wear ever since I tricked him about Guam.

I don’t know what he was so mad about because in the end, he had won the battle between us. I was back.

Grandma Lannert’s house had sat vacant while I’d been gone. I kept telling Dad he needed to clean it out. I thought maybe we could move into it—it was nicer than ours. He’d grunt and shoo me away. Thoughts of that house obviously brought him pain. The house made me sad, but it was still a symbol of good times for me. I had a strong attachment to it.

One day, he decided he didn’t want to ignore the issue any longer. Like a flipped switch, he woke up and decided to clean it out. He didn’t even tell me what he was doing. He didn’t let me help as he lined up trash bags by the curb. He saved a few things, gave other stuff away, and chucked most of Grandma’s belongings. He went about it very harshly.

My heart was broken. I couldn’t understand what he was doing or why. Christy felt the sting of it, too. That house wasn’t just his; it was ours. Grandma told us many times: that house was for Christy and me. She wanted us to come back to it when we graduated from college. She wanted us to use it when we needed it. Of course, she didn’t put her intentions in writing, so everything she had—about $150,000 plus her house—went straight to Dad.

He still didn’t tell us what was going on when the For Sale sign went up. When we begged him to stop, he’d just tell us to shut up. He’d been raised there, and he was giving up a house his parents had built with their own hands. Meanwhile, my happy place—Mee Maw’s house—was going to the highest bidder, meaningless to him. It was a place I could go to just sit quietly and recharge, and I ran over there often. For me and Christy, Grandma’s house was our escape when things got too intense.

With the house on the market, we hit another dark turning point. Whatever safety was left in my world vanished. Where could we go to hide? Nowhere. No place was okay after that. Dad’s decision took the wind out of me, and I crashed.

So did Dad.

Anger emanated from him all the time. The biggest and worst change was when he stopped sleeping in his bedroom. He took up permanent residence in the living room on that couch. It was the center of the household. It was right by the front door where we always came in and out. The back door off the kitchen had a metal storm door that went
thwack
, so we rarely used it. It woke him up, which would piss him off. No matter how we tried to leave his house, he’d know it if he was on the couch. It was a huge problem. We didn’t want to stir him because if we did, he’d start something with us. He’d find anything to scream about; he’d yell at us for stuff we didn’t even do.

For example, it might be 1 p.m., and he’d be passed out on that couch. If I tried to go out somewhere, he’d hear me fiddling with the front door and tell me to step back.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he’d ask. “You need to stay home and clean the house.” Drunks can speak surprisingly clearly sometimes—they become immune to their alcohol. He’d be wasted, and I wouldn’t know it by his voice alone. Other times, he wouldn’t be drunk at all, but his words would still be mean—for no good reason.

With my car keys in hand, I’d say, “We just cleaned the house yesterday.”

“You’re going to clean it again.” Even when he didn’t yell, his tone was terrifying. It was so scary that we did what he said, hoped he’d fall back to sleep soon, and then tried to scoot out again.

Sometimes, he would keep catching me at the front door, and I couldn’t get out at all. He’d make me sit on the couch with him. He wouldn’t even talk to me. He did this to Christy, too. He just wanted to dominate and control us. He’d act ignorant. If he knew I had to be somewhere, he’d tell me to take all the shirts out of his closet and make sure everything was lined up and facing the right way. He wasn’t one of those organized types of people. He was just looking for stupid things to make me do. Or he’d pull out a drawer in the kitchen or his bedroom and dump the contents all over the floor.

“Pick it up,” he said, standing over me as I knelt on the ground.

He’d cuss while I cleaned up his mess. His favorite thing to say was, “You’re just like your mother. Ungrateful.”

He knew he was hurting me. He was humiliating and insulting on purpose. He was aware of my relationship with Mom and how bad it was. He knew I hated being compared to her and that I didn’t want to be anything like her. When he was drunk, he’d call me by her name. If he was drunk
and
hell-bent on being rotten, he would call me her name while he raped me.

I had moved Christy into the basement, so my room was right across from his and near the living room—very convenient for him.

He’d sneak in at night, scaring me. While on top of me, he’d ask, “Do you like that?”

Of course, I don’t like that
, I thought.
I hate this. I hate you
. I’d tune him out the best I could. My mind would go back to a beach on Guam. I would travel all over the world—anywhere to get out of the basement with him.

He’d speak into my ear, holding his mouth close to my head. To this day, I can’t stand somebody whispering to me. I can’t stand the feeling of weight on my chest.

Most of the time, I would hear his voice no matter how far away I tried to go in my head. Often, he’d call me a slut or a tramp. “How many men, Deborah?!” he’d yell as he jabbed. “How many men?”

He never called me Deb or Debbie, the casual names my mom used.

When he got cruel, he’d say, “De-BOR-ah.”

It didn’t matter which women he dated, he was still in love with her—as much as a man like him could be in love with anyone. He would pretend I was her. It wasn’t much of a stretch. As I grew into an adult, I looked exactly like my mom.

“Deborah, Deborah, Deborah,” he’d say. “You’re a bitch and a whore.”

He called me a lot of things, but he never called me Stacey.

Christy and I devised an escape plan so we could get out of the house without being harassed or harmed. We tried to create lives outside as much as we could. She hung around with a group of friends from high school. I never told any of my old friends—Tom W., Rob, or Inga—that I was back from Guam. I hadn’t planned on sticking around St. John long enough to fall back into old patterns. Plus, I had walked away from them all, and I felt like a failure for being back at square one. But I still knew people—just the wrong people. When you smoke pot, you fall into one of two groups. There are the upscale kids who just play around with it; those were my old friends. Then there’s the downscale side of weed—the people who deal it and commit other minor crimes. After Guam, I fell into the downscale group. In fact, I ran into an old friend named Ron. He used to be Aunt Deanna’s best friend, and the two of them babysat me when I was little. Ron had a girlfriend and two little kids. I’d hang out at their house and babysit. I’d loan him small amounts of money when he was hard up. Ron was a small-time criminal always looking to make money without actual effort. Aunt Deanna told me Ron was trouble and to stay away from him. So of course, he became my new regular buddy. At least I had somewhere to go when I needed to get out of the house.

Another friend, Jason, called my house because he knew we had extra cars after Grandma died. We had a 1976 Impala and the 1982 LeBaron. He was hoping my dad would sell him one cheap. I answered the phone, and our friendship was rekindled. Dad agreed to sell him one of the cars, but he didn’t know Jason’s had been impounded after a cop found pot in it. Jason thought my father was a cool, outgoing, boozy guy who had a little bit of money. Once, Jason was at my house when I found a receipt for a $100,000 withdrawal my dad had made from one of Grandma’s accounts. I told Jason I was pissed at Dad for drinking away all of Grandma’s money. Dad was nice to Jason’s face, and he took Jason’s money for the car. But privately, Dad told me I wasn’t allowed to hang around with Jason—because he was half black.

To hang out with my friends, I started sneaking around. Christy had moved her bedroom into the basement living area, so the basement bedroom became our living room, complete with a couch, TV, and bookshelf—and a window with two panes. The outside pane had a latch that had to be unhooked from the outside. I had to unlatch it while he wasn’t looking, or I wouldn’t be able to get out later. The inside pane was easy to take on and off from either direction. If we didn’t remember to fix the window, we would be stuck inside. He was always lying on the couch in a drunken stupor, monitoring the front door. Christy and I tried to remember to leave a chair underneath that window for reentering, to break our fall.

Even during broad daylight (Christy wasn’t at school that often), we used that basement window to go in and out as often as we could. Or if we forgot to unlatch it beforehand, we’d wait downstairs, quiet as trees. When everything was silent upstairs for long stretches of time, we’d try to get out the front door.

I’d park on the perpendicular street, McNaulty Drive, in front of a neighbor’s house so he wouldn’t see my car. Then I’d run through other people’s yards to sneak into the basement window that was in the back of our house. The less he knew where I was, the better.

With everything inside of me, I wanted to leave his house for good, and he could sense that. I reminded him that I was almost eighteen. I taunted him with the possibility of my saying good-bye forever. He countered by telling me he had control over me until I was twenty-one. He was becoming more desperate.

So was I.

On May 28, 1990, I turned eighteen. My birthday fell around Memorial Day weekend, and Jason asked if I wanted to go to Steelville, Missouri, with him to go three-wheeling and hang out in the country—just as friends. Christy was leaving for the long weekend, so I said yes. I took off without asking Dad. When we got there, we found that Jason’s cousin had a litter of adorable beagle-mix puppies. The first thing I did for my birthday was get one. I thought,
I’m going to love it and cherish it
. I named her Caitlin.

I came home on Sunday around 4 p.m. wearing a bikini covered by jean shorts and my track team sweatshirt. I knew better than to walk into my house wearing a bikini top. I opened the front door with my duffel bag in one hand and my puppy in the other.

He was on the couch. “What are you doing with that fucking dog?”

“She’s mine, and her name is Caitlin.” I gently put the dog on the floor and let her sniff around.

“You have until the end of next week to get rid of that fucking dog,” Tom said, slurring.

I felt more powerful than I’d ever felt before. He could tell it. I said, “I’m not going to. Fuck you. I’m eighteen now, and I’m moving out on my own. I’m taking Christy with me.”

He laughed at me, disdainfully. “You’re mine. You’ll always be mine. There’s no place you can go. Your car is in my name. I have your Social Security number. I’ll track you down, and you’ll always be connected to me.” He got up from the couch.

I dropped my duffel as he flipped me around and pushed me up against the wall to the left of the front door. He shoved his hands into my pants and brought them back out. He said I smelled like a man. “Who have you been with?”

“No one.” That was the truth. I wasn’t into dating at that time. My focus was on getting out of his house. “You sick bastard.”

“It’s because you’re so pretty,” he said. “But I can fix that.” I heard a familiar flick as he opened up his pocketknife with a rusty blade. He slid the knife down my cheek from my ear to my lip. “If you weren’t so pretty, there’d be no men.”

He had taken me by surprise, and I was pinned in the corner of the living room between the front door and the TV. I felt the heat from a drop of blood on my face. He yanked my head back by my ponytail. My neck ached, and I heard a sawing sound. He had to saw hard to cut my ponytail off with that dull blade. Once I realized what was happening, I was relieved that he wasn’t cutting up my face.