Three Days
Part 1, Motel Stories
One day out of the blue, Mom moved us to some little motel way out in Westchester. We took a long, hot, dry bus ride to get there, the kind of ride we’d never taken before. It was after she’d come back from the pawnshop with that look on her face like, Oh well. Mom was always hoping against hope for more money but it seemed like every Tom, Dick or Harry was out to rip her off.
My brother Ritt came over the first night – he looked like a human sheep with that short bleached wooly hair of his. Mom told me he was a punk rocker but I just thought he looked ridiculous. Right away he got all pissed off when he saw Mom had bought me a Barbie doll.
"Hey, man!" He shouted when he saw the skinny blond lying naked on the Gideon bible. "That’s like totally not fair!"
Everything was like totally not fair for Ritt. Mom said he had identity issues because he looked like our father and it didn’t help at all that I didn’t. Our father had had wooly hair too and dark beige kind of skin like chamois but I never met him. He died when I was a baby.
Ritt always looked like a sad, lost puppy dog – only he was always so moody he just had to be a boy. Animals aren’t like boys with those sour moods of theirs. You just want to slap their faces and say, Dude! Get over yourself. That’s one reason I like animals more than my brothers. Animals are predictable. If you’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to you. With my brothers it’s a totally different story.
When we were at that motel Mom brought stuff from the grocery store – noodles and salad and million dollar bars but at all the other motels we’d go out to eat somewhere. We were cooped up in there for three whole days.
The second day Ritt left, thank God. I can understand why Mom gave my brothers grass right out of the crib. They were like wild animals. That’s the only way you could take them. Whenever Ritt was around my stomach would twist into knots, and I’d get nervous that something bad would happen. He’s the kid who’d burn down a supermarket or rob an old lady for fun. Random acts of insanity.
Mom always said it was because of the boys home he’d been in – that’s when everything had gone wrong. Some boys had chased him outside, pushed him against a tree and lit his hair on fire. Mom said they called him lots of terrible names that she couldn’t repeat. The names only ill-bred people use.
It wasn’t so bad being in that motel room – I didn’t like the games my brother Pete had wanted me to play with him in the other one. But I missed skating at the beach and walking down all those steps over Pacific Coast Highway and digging in wet sand for sand crabs.
The second night I had a nightmare and woke up sweating. It was about Pete – he was laughing and it was so real. I could smell his gross boy breath and his dirty, dusty skin. He opened his mouth full of food, and tried to spit it all over me but Mom walked in. That’s when I woke up.
Mom was already awake, watching her show Taxi.
"Oh my God," she said. "You’re wheezing."
She handed me my inhaler and looked at me like she had so many times before. I could tell what was going through her mind. She was scared I was going to die.
"It’s okay, Mom," I managed to say. "It’s okay."
I sucked for my life and lay back. God, I was glad Pete wasn’t there. When Mom had come to the other motel room he’d taken away my inhaler.
That’s when I asked her about him.
"He’s gone away, sweetheart," she said, brushing her hand against my cheek. "He won’t hurt you anymore."
She hugged me tight, and a moment later I fell back to sleep.
***
The next morning the cops showed up at our door. One was tall with a buzz cut and looked like Nick Nolte on Rich Man, Poor Man, and the other one reminded me of Tatoo, only he was a little taller. They’d found Pete, they said, and had some questions for us. We went down to the station with them – they took Mom into one room, and me into another. They asked me about Pete – what he was doing the last time I saw him. I said he’d taken away my inhaler, that we’d fought over what to watch on TV. I’d wanted to watch Taxi but he insisted on watching Love, American Style.
In the end he’d taken my inhaler and smothered me with a pillow. The cop with the buzz cut said he’d have to check me out.
"Please lean forward like you’re at the doctor’s office and pull up your shirt," he ordered.
He began to touch my back with his long, bony fingers and I thought of Pete. None of this would’ve happened if he hadn’t been such a weirdo.
"Does that hurt?" He asked, jabbing me. "Does this?"
I shook my head. His hands were cold.
His partner came in and whispered to him, and a moment later a woman with long, frizzy gray hair and big, baby blue eyes walked in. She wore a turquoise muumuu and smelled of patchouli incense and menthol cigarettes. She smiled softly and said she wanted to take me to see Mom.
When Mom hugged me I didn’t want her to let me go because I knew when she did they’d take me away. I knew Pete had done something terrible, this was all his fault.
"I’ll come get you just as soon as I can, kiddo. This nice lady’s going to take you to a nice family. Just wait for me, okay? I won’t be long."
I hugged her once more and walked away with the social worker.
***
Mom likes to say God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle. Which is why it’s taken me so long to remember what happened that night. The night that Pete died. She says she loved him but had to protect me and that not a day has gone by for the past 10 years that she doesn’t ask God to help her. Because she wouldn’t have done anything differently.
I had to protect you, she says. You’re my baby – my baby girl.
I read the court report for the first time six months ago and I burned it. It was full of lies about Mom, accused her of killing Pete. I knew it was wrong, all wrong. The nightmares started up again after I read it – seems like certain things just won’t die. Not if they live inside you. They’ll squirm and struggle and tear your guts out if necessary. That’s how I feel lately. Like I’m slowly going insane – or like I’m slipping slowly but surely away from what I thought to be true. I thought Pete had an accident. Or maybe got into trouble. All I knew was that Mom told me to go to the main room, while she talked to him in her room. She’d just walked in on us. Walked in on him trying to play his game. Walked in to see Love American, Style on the TV.
She told me yesterday why she did it.
"I saw him trying to hurt you. And it’s like I went back to when my mother and my father hurt me. It was like the flip of the switch. I was that little girl again."
She said she walked over to him, slapped him across the face and placed the pillow over his face. Just the same way he’d done with me earlier.
They’re finally letting her out. They were able to get her off with temporary insanity. Turns out her nephew’s a hotshot lawyer with lots of connections. She says it’s God’s way of giving her another chance. She says the only way you can live right in the world is to befriend your demons.
Talk to them. Don’t close the door on them. I think she’s right but I’m not sure I’m ready to look at mine yet. What if they swallow me whole?
Otherwise you never know when they’ll come out and bite you in the ass. Otherwise you don’t know who’s steering the ship.
He Didn’t Need to Be Found
He descended upon their lives on a hot February day looking like a black Grizzly Adams who’d stepped off the set of The Shining. His name was Isaiah. He was wearing a long, black trench coat and dirty black pants, and he looked like a crow who hadn’t eaten in awhile. My sister Margaret noticed his eyes first. She didn’t recognize the father who’d left them – the one who’d play peek a boo with her under the covers, give her piggy back rides around the backyard and sing songs like The Mockingbird Song, My Favorite Things and Do Re Mi. This man was a stranger. A scary stranger, like one of those crazies on the news.
He’d been gone six years – six whole years – and she’d only heard that he’d been in the hospital and that he was sick but that was all. Mom had never talked about him. She should’ve been glad he’d come back but she wasn’t. She was terrified. Something in her gut gurgled and tightened like never before except maybe when she’d watched The Exorcist. She had the sensation that her world was closing in on her.
It was our oldest sister who’d made it happen – Isabel. Isabel who’d stood in front of Mom and demanded, I want my father! because she was tired of being mocked, scorned and ridiculed at school. She with her African features and loud mouth. Our mother had told all the kids they were special – my sisters and two brothers – told them they were somehow better than everyone else because all they had to do was look around and see, was anyone as beautiful? And everyone knew that the children of a white woman and a black man were more beautiful than anyone else in the whole wide world, and beauty itself was like a kind of magic that only a few people possessed. Mom herself was beautiful, and she walked, talked and behaved like a queen – having inherited a refined, elegant bearing from her mother who was supposedly from an aristocratic family, a family that had even founded Barcelona long, long ago. Or maybe it was Quebec.
Minutes after this hairy black crow had flown into their lives, Mom gave him his first assignment. She handed him a rolled up newspaper and told the kids to line up in the living room.
"Your father’s going to teach you a lesson,"she said, dropping into her military sergeant voice. "Spank them."
And he did. One by one they stood in front of him, and when it came to my brother Riley, a blue-eyed tow head, Isaiah asked, "Who’s this?"
"He’s our son," Mom replied.
"Oh, you gave up the ship?"
It’s a miracle she didn’t laugh – she’d never been modest when it came to sex, and anyway they’d had an arrangement – they only came together when they wanted to conceive. He hated the act, and Mom loved it – so she sated her appetites in other pastures.
Later, as Mom was cooking spaghetti and Isaiah sat nearby watching her blankly, she asked what he’d been up to in Frisco where the private investigator had found him. She didn’t talk about the sad things – the fact that he had been committed to Camarillo thanks to his mother, she didn’t ask why he’d been caught stealing things or what it had been like to get those shock treatments. Had they changed him? No, she fluttered around the kitchen like Snow White after the gorgeous prince has kissed her.
"Longshoreman," he said. "Picking grapes."
She lit a joint, closed her eyes and inhaled. She opened her eyes, and smiled. "My soul mate’s come home! I can’t believe you’re here!"
He seemed to be somewhere else – not with her. Far, far away. But at some point he began talking about his friends up north, and Isabel was sitting on the carpet right around the corner, pretending to play with her Cher doll. He said he’d only gone once to the temple of his beloved guru – and there he’d met some guys who’d taken him under their wing.
"They’d have these potlucks in the park where they’d read their poetry. That’s what turned me on about them. They had daughters too – they’d always bring them, but never their wives. It was pretty far out. I finally got to read my poems."
He was a beat poet, carried a little chapbook in his pocket at all times, but it seemed like the only one who’d wanted to hear his poetry was Mom.
The next morning was Isaiah’s second assignment. That’s where I came in. Mom said they did it quickly and that right afterward he kicked her out of the bed. Then the earth shook. Literally. 6.6 on the Richter scale. It wasn’t romantic but at least it was literary – mystical. It was the last time they lay together as man and wife.
Isaiah had other things on his mind. Like the friends he was calling up north, and his plan to make all the kids into yogis. In the attic room he showed them various asanas for an hour the next day and told them to go practice on their own. Margaret would stay, he said. She needed extra help. Isabel and the boys left the attic room, but Isabel peeked through the door to see what he was up to. Margaret, a skinny little eight-year old, sat in front of him wearing a flesh-colored leotard and tights. She hadn’t wanted to wear those but that’s all she had and she’d wanted to be a good girl. Isabel had said she should do what she wanted to, and not worry about the freaky black crow. But Margaret was the quiet one, the obedient one. Compliant. She’d never step outside the lines, or bring attention to herself. She’d never rock the boat. As Isabel looked through the door she saw Isaiah leading her little sister onto his lap. Margaret looked disturbed, frightened even, her little wiry body was clearly tense.
He touched her arms, then her waist and she began to squirm. He continued – and then he looked up. Had he seen Isabel? He let Margaret go. She ran so quickly that she didn’t notice Isabel in the hall. There was nowhere to run to, so she ran out back, behind the garage and cried like she’d never cried before. It would be the last time she’d cry for several years. It would be almost a lifetime.
The day passed in a blur for Margaret. There was nowhere to run to, nowhere at all. No place was safe. No place would ever be safe. Mom was stoned and buzzed on red wine as usual and over the moon that her ‘soul mate’ had returned, the other kids were scared out of their wits of the creature who’d suddenly appeared in their lives. When he’d come to the door he’d bang on it and shout at the top of his lungs, "It's Isaiah!"
He was so loud that the neighbor’s dogs would go crazy barking.
That night as Margaret lay in her bed, she prayed extra hard that Isaiah wouldn’t come get her. Isabel and the boys had all slept over their friends’ houses and Mom was at a Subud meeting so she was all alone in the house. She prayed her ass off but it was tricky - she always had a 50-50 chance with God.
It didn’t work.
He came in smelling of Dove soap - he’d just showered and his bee’s nest hair glistened with drops of water. It was her hair too, hair she’d learn to hate more and more, hair she could never control. Hair that would always remind her of him. He was naked to his waist, covered by a flimsy white towel. He said nothing at all and advanced toward her. And only then did she remember that word Isabel had overheard him say about his friends. Concubines. The daughters had been his friends’ concubines.
He collapsed into bed with her as if he belonged there, as if she belonged to him. As if she was not her own. He slowly groped at her through her nightgown, and she could feel his thing, his dirty lead pipe rub against her. Inside she screamed at the top of her lungs – but outside she was paralyzed. Her body, her voice. All had shut down. Frozen. In fear. Still, she prayed. Please God, let me disappear, please God, please let me disappear – please God, let me just die right here. GOD! Please God.
She didn’t realize it but she was shaking. And squirming. It seemed like his hands had poked at her and squeezed her for hours. She didn’t know how long he’d been there for, or how long he stayed. But suddenly he just stopped. She could hear a car pulling up to the curb. Oh God please let it be Mom. And a moment later he was gone.
Isaiah hadn’t counted on Isabel returning early, and he hadn’t seen her hide behind the door, or skulk like a cat into the master bedroom. Didn’t see her crouching in the shadows near the bed he shared with Mom.
When Mom found him later he looked like a troubled rag doll lying on the beige carpet. His expression was one of shock. Surprise. It took a few minutes for everything to register – and it was all too familiar. She had the feeling that she’d gone back in time to her father’s den in 1945. His body surrounded by splattered red, a mass of flesh stuck to the wall. And a 12-gauge shotgun lying beside him. That was Daddy, this was her soul mate. Both had…
Her eye fell on the picture of the hummingbird on the nightstand and a voice inside of her screamed, "NO!"
***
Nine months later I was born. Mom was staying with the nuns in a kind of rest home and the other kids had all gone up north to stay on some commune in Carmel. Mom wouldn’t talk for a long, long time – it was like she was frozen for a while. Paralyzed.
She couldn’t see the girls again – they reminded her too much of him. They were, she said, his spitting image. So she took back the boys and Isabel and Margaret went into foster homes. Once when I visited Margaret at her foster home she told me the whole thing was Isabel’s fault.
"Isaiah didn’t need to be found," she said."I’m glad you were born but he didn’t need to be found."
But afterward I started thinking and it came to me that that wasn’t right. I mean, if he hadn’t been found – where would that leave me? The nuns always say that everything happens for a reason but I don’t know about that. What I do know is I wish I’d known Mom before – and that she’d come back to me. To us. Seems like her favorite thing to do all day is to look at that picture of the hummingbird. Like it’s the answer to some question she keeps asking herself.
I pray about Mom a lot – every night in fact. And if the nuns have taught me one thing – it’s that you have to have faith. Without faith you’re dead.
These days faith’s all I got.
Part 1, Motel Stories
One day out of the blue, Mom moved us to some little motel way out in Westchester. We took a long, hot, dry bus ride to get there, the kind of ride we’d never taken before. It was after she’d come back from the pawnshop with that look on her face like, Oh well. Mom was always hoping against hope for more money but it seemed like every Tom, Dick or Harry was out to rip her off.
My brother Ritt came over the first night – he looked like a human sheep with that short bleached wooly hair of his. Mom told me he was a punk rocker but I just thought he looked ridiculous. Right away he got all pissed off when he saw Mom had bought me a Barbie doll.
"Hey, man!" He shouted when he saw the skinny blond lying naked on the Gideon bible. "That’s like totally not fair!"
Everything was like totally not fair for Ritt. Mom said he had identity issues because he looked like our father and it didn’t help at all that I didn’t. Our father had had wooly hair too and dark beige kind of skin like chamois but I never met him. He died when I was a baby.
Ritt always looked like a sad, lost puppy dog – only he was always so moody he just had to be a boy. Animals aren’t like boys with those sour moods of theirs. You just want to slap their faces and say, Dude! Get over yourself. That’s one reason I like animals more than my brothers. Animals are predictable. If you’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to you. With my brothers it’s a totally different story.
When we were at that motel Mom brought stuff from the grocery store – noodles and salad and million dollar bars but at all the other motels we’d go out to eat somewhere. We were cooped up in there for three whole days.
The second day Ritt left, thank God. I can understand why Mom gave my brothers grass right out of the crib. They were like wild animals. That’s the only way you could take them. Whenever Ritt was around my stomach would twist into knots, and I’d get nervous that something bad would happen. He’s the kid who’d burn down a supermarket or rob an old lady for fun. Random acts of insanity.
Mom always said it was because of the boys home he’d been in – that’s when everything had gone wrong. Some boys had chased him outside, pushed him against a tree and lit his hair on fire. Mom said they called him lots of terrible names that she couldn’t repeat. The names only ill-bred people use.
It wasn’t so bad being in that motel room – I didn’t like the games my brother Pete had wanted me to play with him in the other one. But I missed skating at the beach and walking down all those steps over Pacific Coast Highway and digging in wet sand for sand crabs.
The second night I had a nightmare and woke up sweating. It was about Pete – he was laughing and it was so real. I could smell his gross boy breath and his dirty, dusty skin. He opened his mouth full of food, and tried to spit it all over me but Mom walked in. That’s when I woke up.
Mom was already awake, watching her show Taxi.
"Oh my God," she said. "You’re wheezing."
She handed me my inhaler and looked at me like she had so many times before. I could tell what was going through her mind. She was scared I was going to die.
"It’s okay, Mom," I managed to say. "It’s okay."
I sucked for my life and lay back. God, I was glad Pete wasn’t there. When Mom had come to the other motel room he’d taken away my inhaler.
That’s when I asked her about him.
"He’s gone away, sweetheart," she said, brushing her hand against my cheek. "He won’t hurt you anymore."
She hugged me tight, and a moment later I fell back to sleep.
***
The next morning the cops showed up at our door. One was tall with a buzz cut and looked like Nick Nolte on Rich Man, Poor Man, and the other one reminded me of Tatoo, only he was a little taller. They’d found Pete, they said, and had some questions for us. We went down to the station with them – they took Mom into one room, and me into another. They asked me about Pete – what he was doing the last time I saw him. I said he’d taken away my inhaler, that we’d fought over what to watch on TV. I’d wanted to watch Taxi but he insisted on watching Love, American Style.
In the end he’d taken my inhaler and smothered me with a pillow. The cop with the buzz cut said he’d have to check me out.
"Please lean forward like you’re at the doctor’s office and pull up your shirt," he ordered.
He began to touch my back with his long, bony fingers and I thought of Pete. None of this would’ve happened if he hadn’t been such a weirdo.
"Does that hurt?" He asked, jabbing me. "Does this?"
I shook my head. His hands were cold.
His partner came in and whispered to him, and a moment later a woman with long, frizzy gray hair and big, baby blue eyes walked in. She wore a turquoise muumuu and smelled of patchouli incense and menthol cigarettes. She smiled softly and said she wanted to take me to see Mom.
When Mom hugged me I didn’t want her to let me go because I knew when she did they’d take me away. I knew Pete had done something terrible, this was all his fault.
"I’ll come get you just as soon as I can, kiddo. This nice lady’s going to take you to a nice family. Just wait for me, okay? I won’t be long."
I hugged her once more and walked away with the social worker.
***
Mom likes to say God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle. Which is why it’s taken me so long to remember what happened that night. The night that Pete died. She says she loved him but had to protect me and that not a day has gone by for the past 10 years that she doesn’t ask God to help her. Because she wouldn’t have done anything differently.
I had to protect you, she says. You’re my baby – my baby girl.
I read the court report for the first time six months ago and I burned it. It was full of lies about Mom, accused her of killing Pete. I knew it was wrong, all wrong. The nightmares started up again after I read it – seems like certain things just won’t die. Not if they live inside you. They’ll squirm and struggle and tear your guts out if necessary. That’s how I feel lately. Like I’m slowly going insane – or like I’m slipping slowly but surely away from what I thought to be true. I thought Pete had an accident. Or maybe got into trouble. All I knew was that Mom told me to go to the main room, while she talked to him in her room. She’d just walked in on us. Walked in on him trying to play his game. Walked in to see Love American, Style on the TV.
She told me yesterday why she did it.
"I saw him trying to hurt you. And it’s like I went back to when my mother and my father hurt me. It was like the flip of the switch. I was that little girl again."
She said she walked over to him, slapped him across the face and placed the pillow over his face. Just the same way he’d done with me earlier.
They’re finally letting her out. They were able to get her off with temporary insanity. Turns out her nephew’s a hotshot lawyer with lots of connections. She says it’s God’s way of giving her another chance. She says the only way you can live right in the world is to befriend your demons.
Talk to them. Don’t close the door on them. I think she’s right but I’m not sure I’m ready to look at mine yet. What if they swallow me whole?
Otherwise you never know when they’ll come out and bite you in the ass. Otherwise you don’t know who’s steering the ship.
He Didn’t Need to Be Found
He descended upon their lives on a hot February day looking like a black Grizzly Adams who’d stepped off the set of The Shining. His name was Isaiah. He was wearing a long, black trench coat and dirty black pants, and he looked like a crow who hadn’t eaten in awhile. My sister Margaret noticed his eyes first. She didn’t recognize the father who’d left them – the one who’d play peek a boo with her under the covers, give her piggy back rides around the backyard and sing songs like The Mockingbird Song, My Favorite Things and Do Re Mi. This man was a stranger. A scary stranger, like one of those crazies on the news.
He’d been gone six years – six whole years – and she’d only heard that he’d been in the hospital and that he was sick but that was all. Mom had never talked about him. She should’ve been glad he’d come back but she wasn’t. She was terrified. Something in her gut gurgled and tightened like never before except maybe when she’d watched The Exorcist. She had the sensation that her world was closing in on her.
It was our oldest sister who’d made it happen – Isabel. Isabel who’d stood in front of Mom and demanded, I want my father! because she was tired of being mocked, scorned and ridiculed at school. She with her African features and loud mouth. Our mother had told all the kids they were special – my sisters and two brothers – told them they were somehow better than everyone else because all they had to do was look around and see, was anyone as beautiful? And everyone knew that the children of a white woman and a black man were more beautiful than anyone else in the whole wide world, and beauty itself was like a kind of magic that only a few people possessed. Mom herself was beautiful, and she walked, talked and behaved like a queen – having inherited a refined, elegant bearing from her mother who was supposedly from an aristocratic family, a family that had even founded Barcelona long, long ago. Or maybe it was Quebec.
Minutes after this hairy black crow had flown into their lives, Mom gave him his first assignment. She handed him a rolled up newspaper and told the kids to line up in the living room.
"Your father’s going to teach you a lesson,"she said, dropping into her military sergeant voice. "Spank them."
And he did. One by one they stood in front of him, and when it came to my brother Riley, a blue-eyed tow head, Isaiah asked, "Who’s this?"
"He’s our son," Mom replied.
"Oh, you gave up the ship?"
It’s a miracle she didn’t laugh – she’d never been modest when it came to sex, and anyway they’d had an arrangement – they only came together when they wanted to conceive. He hated the act, and Mom loved it – so she sated her appetites in other pastures.
Later, as Mom was cooking spaghetti and Isaiah sat nearby watching her blankly, she asked what he’d been up to in Frisco where the private investigator had found him. She didn’t talk about the sad things – the fact that he had been committed to Camarillo thanks to his mother, she didn’t ask why he’d been caught stealing things or what it had been like to get those shock treatments. Had they changed him? No, she fluttered around the kitchen like Snow White after the gorgeous prince has kissed her.
"Longshoreman," he said. "Picking grapes."
She lit a joint, closed her eyes and inhaled. She opened her eyes, and smiled. "My soul mate’s come home! I can’t believe you’re here!"
He seemed to be somewhere else – not with her. Far, far away. But at some point he began talking about his friends up north, and Isabel was sitting on the carpet right around the corner, pretending to play with her Cher doll. He said he’d only gone once to the temple of his beloved guru – and there he’d met some guys who’d taken him under their wing.
"They’d have these potlucks in the park where they’d read their poetry. That’s what turned me on about them. They had daughters too – they’d always bring them, but never their wives. It was pretty far out. I finally got to read my poems."
He was a beat poet, carried a little chapbook in his pocket at all times, but it seemed like the only one who’d wanted to hear his poetry was Mom.
The next morning was Isaiah’s second assignment. That’s where I came in. Mom said they did it quickly and that right afterward he kicked her out of the bed. Then the earth shook. Literally. 6.6 on the Richter scale. It wasn’t romantic but at least it was literary – mystical. It was the last time they lay together as man and wife.
Isaiah had other things on his mind. Like the friends he was calling up north, and his plan to make all the kids into yogis. In the attic room he showed them various asanas for an hour the next day and told them to go practice on their own. Margaret would stay, he said. She needed extra help. Isabel and the boys left the attic room, but Isabel peeked through the door to see what he was up to. Margaret, a skinny little eight-year old, sat in front of him wearing a flesh-colored leotard and tights. She hadn’t wanted to wear those but that’s all she had and she’d wanted to be a good girl. Isabel had said she should do what she wanted to, and not worry about the freaky black crow. But Margaret was the quiet one, the obedient one. Compliant. She’d never step outside the lines, or bring attention to herself. She’d never rock the boat. As Isabel looked through the door she saw Isaiah leading her little sister onto his lap. Margaret looked disturbed, frightened even, her little wiry body was clearly tense.
He touched her arms, then her waist and she began to squirm. He continued – and then he looked up. Had he seen Isabel? He let Margaret go. She ran so quickly that she didn’t notice Isabel in the hall. There was nowhere to run to, so she ran out back, behind the garage and cried like she’d never cried before. It would be the last time she’d cry for several years. It would be almost a lifetime.
The day passed in a blur for Margaret. There was nowhere to run to, nowhere at all. No place was safe. No place would ever be safe. Mom was stoned and buzzed on red wine as usual and over the moon that her ‘soul mate’ had returned, the other kids were scared out of their wits of the creature who’d suddenly appeared in their lives. When he’d come to the door he’d bang on it and shout at the top of his lungs, "It's Isaiah!"
He was so loud that the neighbor’s dogs would go crazy barking.
That night as Margaret lay in her bed, she prayed extra hard that Isaiah wouldn’t come get her. Isabel and the boys had all slept over their friends’ houses and Mom was at a Subud meeting so she was all alone in the house. She prayed her ass off but it was tricky - she always had a 50-50 chance with God.
It didn’t work.
He came in smelling of Dove soap - he’d just showered and his bee’s nest hair glistened with drops of water. It was her hair too, hair she’d learn to hate more and more, hair she could never control. Hair that would always remind her of him. He was naked to his waist, covered by a flimsy white towel. He said nothing at all and advanced toward her. And only then did she remember that word Isabel had overheard him say about his friends. Concubines. The daughters had been his friends’ concubines.
He collapsed into bed with her as if he belonged there, as if she belonged to him. As if she was not her own. He slowly groped at her through her nightgown, and she could feel his thing, his dirty lead pipe rub against her. Inside she screamed at the top of her lungs – but outside she was paralyzed. Her body, her voice. All had shut down. Frozen. In fear. Still, she prayed. Please God, let me disappear, please God, please let me disappear – please God, let me just die right here. GOD! Please God.
She didn’t realize it but she was shaking. And squirming. It seemed like his hands had poked at her and squeezed her for hours. She didn’t know how long he’d been there for, or how long he stayed. But suddenly he just stopped. She could hear a car pulling up to the curb. Oh God please let it be Mom. And a moment later he was gone.
Isaiah hadn’t counted on Isabel returning early, and he hadn’t seen her hide behind the door, or skulk like a cat into the master bedroom. Didn’t see her crouching in the shadows near the bed he shared with Mom.
When Mom found him later he looked like a troubled rag doll lying on the beige carpet. His expression was one of shock. Surprise. It took a few minutes for everything to register – and it was all too familiar. She had the feeling that she’d gone back in time to her father’s den in 1945. His body surrounded by splattered red, a mass of flesh stuck to the wall. And a 12-gauge shotgun lying beside him. That was Daddy, this was her soul mate. Both had…
Her eye fell on the picture of the hummingbird on the nightstand and a voice inside of her screamed, "NO!"
***
Nine months later I was born. Mom was staying with the nuns in a kind of rest home and the other kids had all gone up north to stay on some commune in Carmel. Mom wouldn’t talk for a long, long time – it was like she was frozen for a while. Paralyzed.
She couldn’t see the girls again – they reminded her too much of him. They were, she said, his spitting image. So she took back the boys and Isabel and Margaret went into foster homes. Once when I visited Margaret at her foster home she told me the whole thing was Isabel’s fault.
"Isaiah didn’t need to be found," she said."I’m glad you were born but he didn’t need to be found."
But afterward I started thinking and it came to me that that wasn’t right. I mean, if he hadn’t been found – where would that leave me? The nuns always say that everything happens for a reason but I don’t know about that. What I do know is I wish I’d known Mom before – and that she’d come back to me. To us. Seems like her favorite thing to do all day is to look at that picture of the hummingbird. Like it’s the answer to some question she keeps asking herself.
I pray about Mom a lot – every night in fact. And if the nuns have taught me one thing – it’s that you have to have faith. Without faith you’re dead.
These days faith’s all I got.
