28. MERCY.
MERCY .
The first few months were the hardest, and not because Mary, my foster mother, was terrible—far from it.
She was incredibly nice, but she hovered over me constantly, watching me like I was some fragile, unpredictable thing.
I had no idea what my caseworker must’ve told her to make her think I was a flight risk.
It felt like a joke, because where would I go?
Maybe they thought I’d try to get to my mother, which again, was laughable because no one would tell me where she was.
One evening, Mary sat me down in the kitchen with a warm glass of milk. Two police officers stood in the corner of the room, watching me with closed-off expressions that somehow haunted me more than if they’d just given me an ounce of emotion.
The news of my mother’s suicide was a bullet aimed at my chest.
“No,” I had found myself saying as I shook my head and stood from the chair. “No, you’re wrong!”
Mary’s face broke. “I’m so sorry, Julian.” When she opened her arms, I backed away as my body shook violently.
“No!” I cried, tears soaking my face. My mind was crazed as I searched for any sort of relief from the havoc raging inside of me.
The plates on the counter were pushed into the tiled floors first. “You’re lying!
Mama’s not dead!” I yelled, my vision completely blurred as I blindly reached for other objects to throw.
My legs were taken out from under me.
My head hit the floor with a thud.
My ears rang, the sound echoing in and out around me as the officers held me to the floor.
You’re hurting me , I tried to say, but I couldn’t tell if the words made it past my throat. Before I could tell them I couldn’t breathe, Mary was there. She cradled me in her arms, spewing venom at the officers as oxygen rushed back into my lungs.
Her funeral was a week later. It was a closed casket, and I wondered if there was a reason for that. I’d wanted to see her more than I wanted to be alive. I didn’t know that the last time I’d see her, she’d be in a box being lowered into the ground.
No one came. It was only me, Mary, and the pastor.
Dead.
Is dead.
Is gone.
They buried them together—my parents.
My mother was certainly turning over in her grave.
But I couldn’t un-bury her.
I couldn’t even save her.
After that, I’d thought about my death. I didn’t see the point of trying when the pain that was eating me alive was the closest thing to home I knew. Feeling nothing was a terrible thing. Besides, I wasn’t sure if it would take me to Mama. For all I knew, it was only darkness waiting.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t what Mary thought she signed up for. She wanted a son, and I was no more than a living ghost of someone else’s. No more than trying to make sense of a new world where he would know no comfort like his mother’s arms ever again.
She tried making me talk to a therapist, which I refused. He had dark, unsettling eyes and wore a toupee. He picked his nose and made me want to crawl out of my skin whenever he looked at me.
For a reason I didn’t entirely understand, I made Mary cry a lot. My life made her really sad and I think she felt more pity toward me than any resemblance of love.
It was a few weeks after my ninth birthday that Mary found out she was pregnant. I didn’t even know she was seeing anyone.
That was all it took for her to see me as an intruder, an unwelcome presence in her life. My caseworker picked me up that night. I was the placeholder—a temporary fix, her last resort.
I didn’t think things could be worse until I got to the next house.
My foster parents, Dany and Winston, argued constantly, which also resulted in messes being made that I’d later have to clean up.
They had a son, Patrick. He once woke me in the middle of the night with a knife pressed to my throat because he and his friends thought it’d be funny. It wasn’t.
When I shoved him off, the idiot fell and cut himself.
He had to get four stitches in his hand.
His parents blamed me for the entire incident and made me apologize and clean his room, where I discovered a hidden box of knives.
Patrick’s obsession with blades freaked me out so much that I slept with a chair jammed under my doorknob every night.
At school, his friends targeted me. They taunted me whenever they had the chance. Knowing that by one slip-up I could be removed from my placement, I did my best to keep to myself. The possibility of getting placed somewhere worse is what kept me putting one foot in front of the other.
That is until I got jumped at recess, which resulted in a broken rib. All Patrick had was a black eye—courtesy of one of his friend’s elbows. After that, my caseworker was called. Their reasoning was that I had anger issues . I was just surprised I’d made it two years.
My caseworker, Michelle, wasn’t exactly the nicest. She was old and cranky and treated me like the burden I knew I’d become. In her eyes, I was nothing more than an extra body crowding the already strained system.
When she looked at me in the rearview mirror as we pulled away from the house, her face was covered in exasperation. “You’re eleven years old now. You’re going to have to learn to get along with people or you’ll never make it, Julian.”
How do you tell someone the truth when they refuse to hear the sound of your voice?
I remained silent in the backseat and stared out the window. I grew wary when the drive continued to drone on, seeming to never end. “Where am I going?”
“Mr. Walters was in the service for eight years. He’s better equipped for children like you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all. My unease turned to dread, tightening my stomach until I was nauseous. By the time we pulled into the driveway of a weathered white house with a saggy roof, I was fighting the urge to throw up.
My gut screamed at me to run, but I was trapped.
When Michelle took my hand to lead me up to the porch, I yanked it away, my body trembling.
“Don’t leave me here. Please ,” I begged, desperation cracking my voice.
I knew there was no point when a man with a buzz cut wearing a white tank top stepped outside and Michelle offered him a bright, easy smile.
The second his eyes met mine, I stopped dead in my tracks. I knew that look—I had seen it a hundred times from my father. It was a promise of pain.
Michelle nudged me forward, my legs numb. “Mr. Walters, this is Julian. Say hello to Mr. Walters, Julian.” By her tone, I could tell she expected me to speak, but I couldn’t get my mouth to move.
“Get in the house, boy.” His voice snapped something inside of me. I had this strange feeling that I wouldn’t survive, but I couldn’t run. Like my mother, I had nowhere else to go. “I’ll set him straight, Michelle.”
I walked inside the house and there were three other children, their faces shadowed with exhaustion. A little girl with a pink cast stood at the base of the stairs, her matted dirty hair framing eyes so sunken in that she looked sick. She couldn’t be older than six years old.
I kept walking and found a boy in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor with a mangled brush. He seemed about my age. An older girl, about sixteen, stood at the stove, stirring something in a large pot that smelled like death.
The girl noticed me first. Her left eye was swollen and purple. In a flat tone, she introduced everyone. “I’m Elise. The other two are Ryan and Jasmine.”
“I’m Julian,” I offered, my heart still thumping wildly. My body needed to accept what my mind already had.
The front door slammed, and everyone straightened immediately, slipping back into their tasks. Mr. Walters entered the kitchen with Jasmine trailing behind, her head bowed as she fiddled with the purple bow on her dress .
“You’ll sleep on the floor until you earn a bed,” he told me, his tone hard. I met his cold eyes, understanding. Survival here meant obedience.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, feeling myself detach.
He grunted, looking me over. “I ain’t afraid to strike ya, so you best act right, boy,” he warned, and it’s a trained reaction to keep my body from tensing. “You share bath water here. I’m not running up the bill for any of you. The last one in gets the filth. Since you just got here, that’s you.”
He chuckled like it was funny, then turned and jerked his head toward the backyard. I knew he expected me to follow, so I did. A rusty metal fence surrounded the junk-filled yard. At the edge of the tall grass, there was a red shed sitting atop a stack of cement blocks.
“Consider this your initiation.” My stomach dropped as he motioned toward the wooden stool sitting out front. “Sit.”
I sat down and stared vacantly at the ground.
Mr. Walters went into the shed and when he emerged, he was holding a ragged knife.
Grabbing my hair in a rough grip, he began to slice it away.
When he nicked my scalp, I couldn’t even react.
I was slowly losing everything inside of me. Everything that made me want to live.
Bit by bit.
Piece by piece.
The world continued to tear me apart until my body resembled nothing more than scraps of the person I used to be. It kept taking until the only thing I saw when I looked in the mirror was a ghost staring back.
Three weeks later, I’d arrived late from school when I missed the bus.
That was when he beat me for the first time and during a brief moment, I felt myself relish in the pain.
I was like a fish on land that was gasping at the air—except I was sick of being thrown back.
There was an inkling inside of me that told me to rot, but I kept going back to the field of dandelions with my mother.
I couldn’t give up. I was waiting on a wish.