On Thursday, Oct. Our new house was twice as big as our old one. This did seem to take the edge off things. But this was a school day. No one was up. Something was wrong. I threw off the covers and looked out my window. At the top of our driveway, a police car was parked where our black VW bug should have been. I ran to the family room. Everything looked the same, except for a black leather envelope on the breakfast table. I snapped it open. I have always been afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents.
More than once my mother slapped me so hard and so many times across the mouth that my teeth slit my lips. Beatings with belts hard enough to leave my bottom completely black and blue and my legs covered in welts were not uncommon. I was afraid of losing my parents. I was afraid of everything new and anything different.
We had moved too many times. In first grade alone I went to three schools in three cities in two states. We had come to California from Oregon. We were Seventh-day Adventists. My father wanted to go to the Adventist medical school in Loma Linda. I started first grade in Oregon, in a little one-room Adventist school in Enterprise. When my parents went to California to look for living arrangements, I was sent to live with my grandparents in Portland and enrolled in a public school.
Later that year we moved to Ontario. I was so paralyzed with fear by the time I was enrolled in my third school, Adventist again, that my mother had to arrange for another little first-grader, Terry Hayton, to take me by the hand into the classroom. She became my best friend.
My father was always threatening to leave. I never knew why he wanted to go, blue transistor radio and jockey shorts clutched tightly in his hand, not a word to any of us as he stumbled in and out of the house. Each time, I thought he was never coming back. My mother would let me sleep on his side of the bed during those terrifying nights. And he was. Until the time he really did move out for a while. It was quieter, sadder. We all cried. Mom cried.
