them.”
“Someone will be by.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“I can keep them for the night. But I’m . . . I just don’t have it to keep them for longer. I’m too old.”
“Someone will come by. Just keep them here for a couple more hours.”
Then the door shut, and from the window I could see Detective Wagner as he went down the walk, back into the rain. The cops were still working across the street. He started talking to some of them, then used the walkie- talkie in one of the police cars. He glanced over to Mrs. Ralleigh’s house once, and he saw my brother and me in the window.
He turned his back.
We were placed with our first foster family a week later.
I was eleven. Mikel was fifteen. Our father had murdered our mother, and now we were going to live with people we had never met before.
There was no way it could end well.
The Larkins were sweet people, good-hearted, born-again. They wanted it to work. The problem was they already had six kids, and two more with the designation “troubled” was just too much. I was easy. I just wouldn’t speak unless there was no other alternative. At least I wasn’t acting out, yet.
Mikel was acting out all over the place.
He’d been honing his “troubled youth” act even before our own family had been dissolved, and when we were placed with the Larkins, he went pro. If there was trouble, he’d find it; he got into fights, he stole money, booze, even a car. He robbed Mrs. Larkin blind, taking cash out of her purse when her back was turned, then disappearing for days on end. He got arrested three times, the last for a felony assault, and that was the one that did it; he ended up getting sent to Hillcrest, a juvenile facility outside of Salem.
Tommy had already been sentenced and sent off to the Oregon State Penitentiary at that point. He’d taken a plea, and that decision avoided a trial, which was a good thing, since a trial would only have served to make us all look like the Gresham White Trash we truly were; ignorant, barely literate, and certainly a burden on society. Two kids who were unremarkable at school, one of whom was already building a record; a mother with a string of arrests for drinking and disturbances; a father responsible for a record of his own, alcoholic, known to take drugs, unable to hold down a job; a history of State visits, monitoring the status of the kids; police reports on various domestic disturbances; emergency room bills leading to a conclusion of domestic violence.
So my mother was gone, my father was gone, and now Mikel was gone. The world had shifted onto an insane axis, and everything I’d been sure of turned out to be wrong. The only thing I could say was true was that I’d seen my family disappear entirely over the course of eight months.
So I did the inevitable, and picked up where Mikel had left off.
Three weeks after Mikel went to Hillcrest, I didn’t come home after school, and that was the final straw for the Larkins. When I was finally escorted back to their home at four in the morning, I was drunk, with a Portland police officer at each shoulder. I’d gone home with a friend and stolen a fifth of Early Times from her parents’ pantry, then lied and said I was going back to the Larkin home. Instead, I’d gone up to Mount Tabor Park and gotten shitfaced. Someone who was nice had found me passed out while walking their dogs and called the police.
All the kids were in bed, but Mrs. Larkin was up, and I remember the look on her face when she answered her door. Her eyes were swollen almost shut from crying and she took me from the officers and gave me a hug like I was one of her own. She didn’t ask where I’d been, she just thanked the cops, told them that Mr. Larkin was out looking for me, driving around, but that he’d be back soon.
She put me in the shower, got me cleaned up and into a nightgown. Then she brought me to the room I shared with her two eldest daughters and put me in bed. She knelt beside me and kissed me on the forehead. The other girls were awake, but pretending not to be.
After Mrs. Larkin left, one of the girls said, “You’re not very nice.”
She was right. I wasn’t very nice. There wasn’t anything I could say to that.
Less than a month later I was moved to a new family, named Quick, outside of Salem. The move upset me; I was terrified Mikel wouldn’t be able to find me.
The Quicks were middle-aged, with the father working for the state government, and the mother one of those uber-moms who can juggle three Tupperware parties while organizing the school bake sale. They had two boys, both older than I was, one of them just sixteen, the other fourteen. Upon my arrival there was a family meeting where they all told me they understood things had been hard, and that they were willing to try if I was. I told them that I was willing to try, and they said that was good, and it lasted about three weeks, and then the brothers decided that since I wasn’t really their real sister, maybe they could do some of those things they’d been hearing that boys do with girls.
It started with the older brother, Brian, urging the younger one, Chris, to put his hand down my shirt. I didn’t know what he was after until he had his hand on my breast, at which point I shoved him, hard, and he fell down, hard, and hit his head on the corner of the bed and started howling. Mrs. Quick scooted in to find out what the commotion was about, and I told her, and she confronted Chris, who promptly denied it. Brian, standing by, backed him up, and told his mother that my attack had been unprovoked.
Two to one, I lost.
If that had been the end of it, I might have been able to take it.
It wasn’t.
Realizing that they could get away with it, Brian and Chris proceeded to see just how far they could go. One of them figured out how to pick the lock on the bathroom door with a flathead screwdriver, and soon I was taking thirty-second showers. We’d be watching television and the moment a parent left us alone, Brian or Chris would grope me, or poke me, or, on one occasion, expose himself to me.
And I would shout at them to stop, would shout for someone to believe me, and Ma and Pa Quick would tell me that I needed to stop acting out, to stop trying to get attention. I needed to be a good girl, they told me. I needed to behave.
So that’s how this is going to work, I realized, at which point I decided to hell with them. If this was what doing my best was going to get me, they could have my worst, and I gave it to them with both barrels.
That day I came back to the house because I thought Mrs. Quick was going to be at home like she’d said she would be, and I’d be protected. I was in the living room dropping my backpack when Brian and Chris came out of their room and told me they had something to show me.
“I don’t want to see,” I said.
“You do,” Chris said. “You do.”
“Just come in here,” Brian said. “We’ve got something we want to show you.”
It was the way he said it, it turned something in my stomach to lead. Precognition or instinct or something else, but I knew that if I ended up in their room, it would be very bad for me.
I grabbed my backpack and started for the door, and Brian moved to cut me off. Then Chris was coming in at my right, and they were grabbing me and pulling me and I was shouting and kicking and fighting.
“Grab her pants,” Brian shouted. “Grab her by her pants!”
They dragged me, screaming and struggling, after them. Laughing. Like it was funny. I’d lost one of my sneakers, and my jeans were slipping down because of the way Chris was yanking on my pant legs, and I could feel the rug burning my back because my T-shirt was being pulled up by the friction on the hall carpet.
“C’mon, quit fighting!” Brian was shouting at me. “We’re gonna fuck, it’ll be fun!”
I kicked and pleaded, and it didn’t do any good, and then suddenly both boys had let me go, and were staring over me, gone absolutely quiet. Looking like they’d seen their own death, the color just gone from their faces. I twisted and rolled and looked where they were looking.
Their father stood at the end of the hall, holding his jacket in one hand, his briefcase in the other. He’d been
