Chapter Seven A Ghost Come Back
Seven
A Ghost Come Back
Even today, I remember Dad’s face when he walked into the police station.
At that moment, I was holding tight to the arms of a borrowed swivel chair and spinning in circles.
By then, I’d seen things no child should ever see, things that made me feel so much older than my fifteen years.
From a distance, I may have looked like a kid enjoying the dizzy thrill of a makeshift Tilt-a-Whirl.
But there was no joy in me. When Dad walked in, he flinched at the sight of me, his listless, abused little girl.
“Goddamned slut,” he spat. “Fucking whore.” Then, though, he did something I’d never seen him do. He started to cry.
Some of this is a blur for me. I know the outline of what happened, and I can summon many of the feelings I felt, but my mind protects me by not bringing the scene into too sharp a focus.
I remember Dad with his head in his hands, telling me Mom didn’t want me to come home, so he was sending me back to Growing Together.
I pleaded with him, but he said he needed a week to find me somewhere else to stay.
“One week,” he promised, “and I’ll come get you out.
” A police officer handcuffed me then and put me in the back of a squad car to return me to juvie.
Everyone believed I would try to run. But I was too tired to run.
I would give Dad the week he asked for. I hoped that maybe, just this once, he’d keep his word.
Walking back into Growing Together, I recognized only a few of the kids.
One girl told me I looked like “a ghost come back” from the other side.
That felt about right. I bided my time, but with every passing day, I had less faith in my father.
Finally, when Growing Together sent me out with a chaperone to get my blood and urine tested, I made a break for it.
Finding a pay phone in a mini-mall parking lot, I called my parents’ house.
Dad answered, full of excuses. “I’m trying to convince your mother to sign the papers to get you out of there,” he said.
“Well, you can quit that, because I’m already out,” I said. “Now come pick me up so I can come talk to Mom.” Dad wasn’t happy, but he did what I asked.
When we got back to Rackley Road, Mom was nowhere to be found.
I looked in the kitchen and stuck my head into my old room, which they’d made into an office.
Finally, I went out back, where I found her sitting in an old rusty lawn chair, smoking a cigarette, a beer can in her hand.
When she saw me, she stood up and walked toward me.
I knew better than to hope for a hug. She greeted me with a hard slap in the face, but then we both were crying.
She didn’t want to hear where I’d been, she said.
She couldn’t bear the thought of it. But I could stay, at least for the night.
When I think about this day, I can’t linger on my parents.
Thinking of them is too awful. Instead, I think of Skydy, running out the back door, the screen slamming shut as he flung himself into my arms. He held me so tight that the rest didn’t matter.
Someone loved me, truly. That didn’t fix everything, but it would have to be enough.
I stayed in my parents’ house only a short while.
While they didn’t throw me out, exactly, Mom soon made it clear I wasn’t welcome on Rackley Road.
I moved in with the family of a girl named Lorna, who I’d met at Growing Together.
But that ended just a few months later, after Lorna’s dad announced that I was a bad influence on her.
Lorna was back to partying again and had been caught shoplifting.
I protested that I hadn’t been with her when she stole anything, but her dad was done with me.
I couldn’t totally blame him—it’s not like I was helping Lorna get clean, and I’m sure he was wondering why my own family didn’t want me.
But I was resentful and told him so. Are you noticing a pattern?
I was unwanted, so I acted like a girl no one would want.
A captive for so long, I had no idea how to harness my freedom.
That’s when Lorna’s stepbrother, Michael, said I could live with him in Fort Lauderdale.
Michael was a kind but troubled boy who was two years older than me.
We’d met when he visited Lorna’s family’s house—where he’d once lived—and I could tell he had a crush on me.
So when he suggested being roommates, I had an idea of what he was hoping for.
But I still said yes. Once again, desperation—not affection—determined my love life.
Michael rented us an apartment, which we shared with a friend of his named Mario.
Michael was working full time as a manager at Taco Bell and eventually helped me get a job there too.
One thing led to another until we started having sex.
But I had no romantic feelings for him. I just didn’t know how to set boundaries with men who wanted things from me.
On Valentine’s Day 2000, Michael asked me to marry him, offering me his grandmother’s ring.
I couldn’t say yes—I was just sixteen, two years short of Florida’s age requirement without parental consent.
But I didn’t clearly say no, either, or tell him the truth: that I wasn’t in love with him.
Years later, he’d say he believed that I’d accepted his proposal.
I can understand why. For all the changes I wanted to make, it seemed I was paralyzed.
Instead of choosing my own path, I was letting life happen to me.
When I had opportunities to take control and advocate for myself, I often found it easier to get fucked up on alcohol or drugs instead.
“I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me,” Richard Ashcroft sings in “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” I must’ve listened to that song by the Britpop rock band The Verve a thousand times that year, wanting to believe, as Ashcroft asserts, that “I can change, I can change,” but knowing that, like the song says, I was “a million different people from one day to the next.” When I heard the Goo Goo Dolls song “Slide,” I again felt the sting of recognition.
“Your father hit the wall / Your ma disowned you,” they sang.
“Do you wanna get married? Or run away?” I knew the answer—run! —but I didn’t act on it.
Michael and I lived in that Fort Lauderdale apartment until we were evicted for failure to pay rent and for living, in all honesty, like wild beasts—or should I say among them?
One of the few things Michael and I had in common was our love of animals, and we had a lot of pets: dogs, cats, even a ferret.
We sort of tried to keep the place clean, but when we were thrown out of it, it was a pigsty.
Homeless again, I broke down and asked my parents if Michael and I could live in a travel trailer they’d parked in their back horse paddock.
The trailer looked out on the pond, where years before I’d taken refuge on our tiny island and where I’d taught Alice to swim.
The trailer had a bed, a bath, a kitchenette, and a small sitting area—plenty of room for us, at least for a while.
My parents said yes, and days later, I was back on Rackley Road.
Today, I see this as a moment that could have set me on a better path.
Through a stroke of luck, I’d landed the perfect job for a girl who’d dreamed of being a veterinarian.
I worked the morning shift at a pet store called The Kookaburra’s Nest, where I was learning to run its aviary.
The pay was good—more than $8 an hour—and I found I loved breeding, feeding, grooming, and selling exotic birds.
I hand-raised Sugar, a yellow-crested cockatoo, from a chick.
Sugar used to ride around on my shoulder, and when I gave her a bath, I’d tell her she was my baby, and she’d coo with happiness.
Sugar was a beauty—all white but for a yellow comb on her head, and yellow ear patches and flight feathers—and I was determined to make her mine.
Every two weeks, I set aside money from my check.
But before I’d saved even half of Sugar’s $1,200 price tag, someone came in and bought her out from under me.
“The customer always comes first,” my boss said, when I pitched a fit.
And in truth, the last thing I needed was another mouth (animal or human) to feed.
Still, I was inconsolable. Losing Sugar felt like losing Alice all over again.
So when another aviary recruited me to work for them, I accepted their offer just to spite the boss who’d sold Sugar.
That decision proved a mistake, though, when my new employer abruptly shut down. I was unemployed again.