“You OK?” he asked, pulling a gritty T-shirt over his head and tossing it into the now-empty laundry basket.
“I’m fine,” she said.
There were things they never talked about. Things about his past that just seemed to be silent between them. Olivia’s parents had known great hardship when they sneaked across the border at Nogales and made their way up to Washington State’s Yakima Valley, where they picked apples and sent as much of the money home to Mexico as they could. That meant no new clothes, no books, no “extras” of any kind. There were days when they had nothing to eat but blocks of government surplus cheese and pinto beans.
Olivia made light of those days.
“Try living in a two-room shack with five brothers who have eaten nothing but beans, and you’ll know what a nightmare really is,” she’d say in her canned answer to those who asked about her past. It was always said with a laugh. Yet there was hurt there, too.
She’d been the reason her family came across the border that night. Her mother had her a week later in a motel outside of El Paso. When she was well enough to travel, they swaddled her and took a bus up north. In the years since, her three oldest brothers became naturalized citizens and successful businessmen. The two youngest never bothered.
All of that was an open book. It had to be. She needed her own children to understand where she had come from in order to be more than she’d ever dared to dream.
But not her husband. Michael was closed off from his past and even the slightest nudge toward some information about it brought rebuke. Sometimes even anger.
“I saw the clipping in your wallet,” she said, her voice tentative. Her big eyes stayed fixed on him.
“That was a long time ago,” he said.
“I know. But you’ve never told me about it. About your
“I’m not going to start now, Olivia.”
He pulled off his jeans and took off his underwear, toe-kicking it into the basket. He was a pretty good shot and if she hadn’t been trying to uncover more of his life she might have said so just then. She might even have said something about his physique. The workout in the yard left his muscles bulging and he’d looked more like an underwear model, sans underwear, than he did a computer systems geek. He turned on the shower and stepped inside, keeping his distance from the icy spray while waiting for it to warm.
Olivia stood by the glass door.
“Michael, I just want to know you better,” she said.
He ducked his head under the water and she wondered if he’d heard her at all.
“I love you, Olivia, but I can’t talk about that, babe. Don’t ever ask again.”
Olivia stood in the bathroom, the steam swirling from the shower and the image of her husband standing before her growing more and more distant. It was more than a metaphor for who he was, but who he’d always be.
Inside the shower, Michael Barton’s tears mixed with the water.
The thought that just scuttled through his mind almost made him laugh, had it not been so painful. Robert and Helen Hansen had the first foster home that he and his sister had been assigned to after their mother failed to show up after leaving them at Disneyland. The Hansens were what he would later call “K4Ms” or Kids for Money— the kind of family who pretends to want to help children, but really only wants the $300 per head they get from the State of California each month.
Although state law prohibited keeping more than two children in a bedroom—and they had to be two children of the same gender—Michael and Sarah slept in a back bedroom of the Hansens’ house in Tustin with four other children. The Hansens outfitted the room with three bunk beds that Robert Hansen had built himself out of pressure-treated timber he stole from a landscaper three blocks away. The chemicals in the wood made the kids sick, which made Helen Hansen madder than usual.
The first time that Robert Hansen abused Michael was a couple of weeks after he and his little sister arrived for foster care. Michael and the oldest boy in the house, a lanky kid with red hair and a swarm of freckles, were watching TV when Mr. Hansen came into the den. Mrs. Hansen, a morose brunette with spider veins that practically crocheted the skin around her ankles, had gone to the grocery store. The other kids were napping in the little warren of beds that met the minimum requirements for youth housing.
“Tim, you watch the kids,” he told the redhead.
“OK, Papa,” the boy said, barely looking up from the TV.
“Son, I want to show you something,” he said, taking Michael by the hand and leading him to the garage. A cat meandered past them, and for a second, Michael thought that he was there to play with the cat. But the cat kept going, and Mr. Hansen said nothing to stop it. It was a two-car garage, but inside there was a single car and a workbench, a bed for the dog, and an old sofa.
Mr. Hansen was working on a Corvette that he’d been restoring for months, if not years. Its red fiberglass body was spotted with Bondo.
“Hop in,” he said, holding open the passenger door.
Michael climbed inside. The car fascinated him at first. He’d had a Hot Wheels car similar to it back in Portland, though that, and everything else he owned, had been left behind.
“Beauty, huh?”
Michael watched as the man slid into the driver’s seat. He reached over and clicked the automatic garage door opener and the gears overhead started to grind as the hinged panel rolled down, shuttering the sun from the garage. It went from a blast of light to a slit, to near darkness. Michael felt Mr. Hansen take his hand and press it into his crotch.
“That’s a good boy,” he said.
Michael wasn’t sure what was happening, but he knew it was wrong. He tried to pull his hand away, but Mr. Hansen wouldn’t let him.
“Hold on, cowboy,” he said, leaning closer, his hot breath now against Michael’s cheek. “You’re gonna make Papa feel good.”
The rest of what happened was lost in his memory. It wasn’t because it wasn’t traumatic, because to Michael Barton, it absolutely was. It was lost because, over time, Michael just turned it off.
“Suck on me until I tell you to stop,” Mr. Hansen said.
Michael looked up and started to cry. “I want my mom.”
“Stop crying and suck. Your mom dumped you because you were a bad boy.”
Michael protested some more, but Mr. Hansen palmed the back of his head like a volleyball and pressed it to his groin.
“Yeah, that’s a good boy. That’s my good boy.”
It seemed to last a long time.
Mr. Hansen was a cigar smoker who liked to light up afterward and wave the cigar around, taunting the boy.
“Bet you’d like this in your mouth, too?”
While Michael was able to push most of the repulsion and shame that he felt out of his mind, whenever he smelled the pungent smoke of a While Owl cigar, his stomach would roil into knots.
Years later, he pushed the memory aside. Only temporarily, of course. He pulled a paper towel from the bathroom rod and patted his face. The mask was on. He looked good. He looked in control.
