Three Little Words (28 page)

“What’s up?” The voice was not Brooke’s. Tabitha had stopped by to return a CD she had borrowed.

She saw the tea and wine on the bathroom counter. “What’s going on?”

I closed the bathroom door behind us and told her as little as possible.

“That’s not cool at all,” she said. “I’m out of here!”

“Bye!” she called to my parents in the living room.

I handed Gay the tea. Very casually, I said to Phil, “Thought you might like another glass of wine.”

“Thanks, cutie-pie,” he said. “What’s with Tabitha? I don’t think she was here more than thirty seconds.”

“Oh, she’s jealous that Brooke is coming over. Those two don’t get along.”

“Three’s a crowd,” Gay added, and turned back to the news.

“I’m going to take a shower,” I mumbled.

Just as I soaped up my hair, I heard banging on the bathroom door. Phil shouted, “Ashley, open this door at once!” I pretended I did not hear him.

Gay yelled, “What did you put in our drinks?”

How had they known so quickly? Had Tabitha called them? Phil’s pounding increased. “Either you open the damn door or I’ll break it down!”

I stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around me. I turned the lock and jumped back in time to avoid the door slamming into me.

Phil pinned me against the linen cabinet. “What did you put in our drinks?”

“N-nothing,” I insisted. “Maybe the water was bad.”

“What about my glass of wine?” His neck flamed scarlet.

Gay said, “We both tasted something bitter. I chased down Tabitha, and she admitted that you put”—she choked—“pills in our drinks.”

“Did not!” I tried to wriggle away. Phil held my shoulders firmly while I clung to the towel to keep it from slipping. The shower was still running. Gay pushed past us and turned it off.

“He’s hurting me!” I protested to Gay.

Phil allowed me to squirm so the cabinet’s handle did not press into my back. “What was in the drinks?”

“Nothing!” I insisted.

“We have a lot of medicines in this house,” Gay said in a raspy voice, “and chemicals and poisons. How long do we have? Do we need to call an ambulance?”

“No.” I felt as if my limbs were melting. Phil’s grip kept me from falling.

“Then we’ll have to call the police,” Gay continued in a slow, deep voice.

I dropped my head. “It was just Advil.”

“How many?”

“Only a few,” I whispered.

“Why?” Phil asked in panting breaths.

“Just to make you tired sooner.” Tears flowed as if a faucet had been twisted on full blast. “Now I’ve ruined everything!”

Gay’s mouth looked as if a gash had sliced her face. My heart was skipping beats, pounding inside my chest. Even though it was Phil who was restraining me, I was more terrified of what Gay would do to me.

“What are you talking about?” Phil asked. He loosened his grip.

I collapsed to my knees on the floor. “This is the end of my placement!”

“Placement?” Gay sputtered. “We have adopted you.” Her anger seemed to expand as she moved closer to me. “You’re our daughter, so cut the poor-orphan-me crap. We never had anywhere to send our sons, so why should you be different?”

But I was different—or at least I had felt different. I glanced up at Gay. She was fuming, but I was certain that she wasn’t going to hurt me or … I swallowed hard at the next thought: She wasn’t going to ditch me, either.

Gay exhaled. “Now go get dressed, and then we will deal with your idiotic behavior.”

I was so ashamed, I stayed in my room for the entire weekend. I lay in bed feeling feverish as I tried to rewind what I had done and find a way to make it so that it had never happened. Every time I got to the part where I mixed the crushed pills in their drinks, I would run to the toilet and vomit.

Gay held cold washcloths to my forehead while I wretched. I could not believe she was being so kind; meanwhile, Phil had not come near my room.

Sunday evening Gay came to tuck me in. “Did you ever do anything horrid when you were my age?” I asked.

“Oh, there were some stupid pranks,” she admitted. “Once, we had a slumber party, and we were going to make plaster face masks. When we tried to remove one of my friend’s masks, we started to yank her eyelashes out.”

“That’s awful!”

“My mother had to clip her lashes with sewing scissors.” I laughed. “It wasn’t funny then.” Gay’s voice deepened. “That was an unintentional mistake. What you did was far worse. You’ll need to talk to your therapist about it.”

“Okay.” I managed to focus on her expression and saw compassion, not resentment. I would do whatever it would take to regain their trust.

Gay flipped off the light. I turned my face upward for the inevitable kiss. Her lips brushed my tear-chapped cheek. “Love you, sweetie,” she said.

I clutched her arm. She froze. Then I kissed her back. “Love you, too,” I said.

“Are you serious?” Tess was filling me in on the latest gossip while I gave myself a pedicure. The television news was playing in the background. Suddenly, the anchor-woman said, “Charles and Marjorie Moss.” I looked up, saw their mug shots, and dropped my brush. It missed the bottle and landed on the carpet.

“Gay!” I shouted. “Come see this!”

Just then the other phone line rang. Gay picked it up. “Really? That must be what Ashley just got excited about.” She mouthed
Mary Miller
to me and jotted down some notes. When she hung up the phone, she braced herself on the counter. “Mary says that Mrs. Moss was arrested on twenty-five counts of felony child abuse and nine counts of felony child neglect for abusing the children she and her husband were allowed to adopt after their foster home was closed. Mr. Moss was also arrested for failure to prevent or report it.”

“See! I tried to tell everyone, but nobody would listen.” I reached for a metal post that supported the ceiling and spun around, lifting my feet off the floor as I thought about the Mosses in their respective jail cells. “They’re gonna get it now!”

Exactly eleven years to the day that my mother was first arrested, the newspapers featured the Moss arrest. I studied the Mosses’ mug shots. To me, they looked like Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. But I knew how quickly they could morph into something else: a brownie-baking mom, a fascist guard, or self-crowned foster parents of the year. Dress Mr. Potato Head up in plastic droopy eyes and thin-pursed lips, and you could replicate Mr. Moss’s blank stare in front of the television while his wife was torturing a child. I read the caption next to their photos in the
Tampa Tribune
and shouted, “I knew they would try to blame the kids! It says: ‘The attorney for the couple accused of child abuse says the teenage children are making up the allegations.’” My long-suppressed simmering ire erupted into a full boil.

The story reported that the Mosses were accused of abusing their adopted children over the past four years and that Mrs. Moss was accused of beating the children using her hands, feet, a wooden paddle, and a two-by-four board. Most of their children were in state custody again. “They’re probably glad to be out of that house of horrors, but now they’re back in foster care.” I sighed. “And one of them is Mandy.”

Phil read from the article, “It says here that their attorney said ‘These people were the epitome of good foster parents’ and that ‘their reputation has been totally damaged.’”

“What about
my
reputation?” I shouted. “They told everyone I had been lying!”

“It mentions that they were investigated three times before, but the charges were never substantiated,” Gay said. “Weren’t you questioned when you were there?”

“Yes, several times.” I turned to the
St. Petersburg Times
story. It concluded by saying that the Mosses were in the process of adopting a ninth child.

“I need to do
something
to help those kids. If I tell the police what happened, it will be cooperation.”

“You mean ‘corroboration,’ cutie-pie,” Phil said with an uneasy chuckle.

“And could you call the newspapers, too?” I tossed in.

Phil rubbed his chin. “And tell them what?”

“That there are more of us out there who’ve got a lot to say about the Mosses!”

Gay agreed to call the newspapers. A reporter from the
St. Petersburg Times
, Wayne Washington, was interested in the information we offered. That afternoon he drove out to the Mosses’ trailer, and he spoke to both Mary Miller and Mrs. Merritt. The article that appeared the next morning called the Mosses’ mobile home “a living hell for children.” It quoted Mrs. Merritt: “This isn’t something that fell through the cracks because they didn’t know.” It also included Gay’s comments about my cruel punishments.

“She’s still locked up!” I crowed when I learned that Mrs. Moss remained in jail on $635,000 bail with thirty-four charges of felony child abuse and neglect, but I was disappointed to learn that Mr. Moss was free on bond and that he had been charged with only six counts of felony child neglect. According to Mr. Washington’s article, “He did nothing, an arrest report said, as his wife maliciously punched the children, pulled them into a bathroom and held them under hot water, deprived them of food, threatened them with a gun, denied medical care, and beat them with a wooden paddle.”

“The article said they put one kid—I wonder if I knew him—in juvenile detention, so nobody will believe him.” I paused. “But I’ve never been in any trouble, so they might listen to me.”

“I don’t want you involved in a criminal case,” Phil said.

“I
need
to do this!”

“Why?” he asked.

“For me, for Luke, for Mandy, for the other kids they hurt. And”—I took a deep breath—“to keep them from getting more children. I don’t want this to blow over like the other investigations. They aren’t fit to take care of gerbils, let alone children.”

Detective Shannon Keene, who was handling the Moss case, arranged for me to be interviewed by our local authorities. The next day Deputy Tina Brooks met me at my parents’ office after school. The deputy’s daughter was in my class, and we had worked on a project together.

“Do you have proof that Ashley lived with these people?” Deputy Brooks asked Gay.

Gay handed her the list of my placements that she had found in my files, which showed the eight months I had lived with the Mosses.

I answered the deputy’s questions—surprising myself with how fresh the memories still were, even though it had all happened seven years earlier. A few days later I had to go to the Citrus County Sheriff’s Department, where they videotaped my statement. I thought I would be frightened to talk to these law enforcement authorities and looked for a place to concentrate my attention; however, the more I spoke, the easier it was. All I was doing was telling the truth, and nothing I said was going to get me into further trouble.

We received transcripts of my session as well as those of some of the other children interviewed. Just in case Gay or Phil ever thought I had been exaggerating, I pointed out that the other children’s comments were nauseatingly familiar. For instance, I had testified: “I was sleeping on a top bunk and I can recall a couple of occasions when I was taken by my hair and just thrown on the floor.” One of the other victims told the authorities that she had been pulled by her hair into the bathroom. Mrs. Moss used to punish Luke by dunking his head in the bathtub, and one of the adopted kids claimed Mrs. Moss held her head underwater for several minutes until she had trouble breathing.

I gave a detailed description of the squatting punishments, and another child explained how Mrs. Moss forced her to squat for hours at a time. Hitting was a common punishment. I testified that Mrs. Moss beat me with the spaghetti spoon. One of the new victims revealed that Mrs. Moss beat her for putting a movie in the wrong case and struck her in the face for not sweeping the patio correctly. The Mosses kept another child home from school until her bruises disappeared.

After the second article appeared in the
St. Petersburg Times
, Gay received a call from a woman who said that two of her children, Gordon and Heather, had lived in the Moss home the same time I was there. “Gordon remembers Ashley,” the woman said. “They’ve told me all the same stories, and I complained to the department, yet nobody would listen.”

Gay told her that the reporter wanted to hear from other children who were in the Moss home, and she agreed to contact him.

Wayne Washington called to talk to me about what I remembered. “Will your parents allow me to interview you directly?” he asked in a mellifluous voice.

Gay got on the phone and set an appointment for him to visit our home. When he arrived, I showed him to Gay’s office.

“Wow!” Mr. Washington said when he took in the sweeping views of the Crystal River. “This is where the manatees come in the winter, right?” I nodded. “Not exactly like your foster home, is it?”

Mr. Washington was even more thorough than the deputies had been, and I gave him many details. After he left, I asked Gay, “Do you think he believed me?”

“Of course he did.”

I grinned, then dashed off to do my homework.

A few weeks after Wayne Washington interviewed me, he called Gay to verify some facts and told her that he had copied the Mosses’ foster care licensing file.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said to her.

“Apparently, it’s public record, and it substantiates what you described. He told me that we should look at it”—Gay paused meaningfully—“before too long.” She cleared her throat. “He said that it refers to a report that is critical of how they treated Luke. And there’s a mention that the report should be destroyed.”

I gasped. “Is the report there?”

“No, Mr. Washington only found the reference to it. The licensing file also says that Mrs. Moss stated that she no longer allowed the children to taste her home-cooked hot sauce.”

“Remember when we were in Cousin Neil’s office and I wanted to sue the Mosses? Phil said it would be their word against mine. Now here’s the proof!”

“You have a right to be angry,” Gay replied, “but don’t let it eat you up inside.”

Phil already gave me his Dalai Lama lecture. “We’ve been through the whole forgiveness thing and none of that changes the fact that they keep hurting children.”

I often went to the movies with my friends on Saturday nights, but nobody was available one weekend. “Why don’t you come with us?” Gay suggested. “We’re going to see
Erin Brockovich.”
I wrinkled my nose at the title. Gay played the guilt card. “We haven’t seen a movie as a family in a long time, and I’d like to take Grampy. He hasn’t been out of the house in a while.”