The house on Hoxie was a battlefield, a war zone of screaming, swearing, and disrespect. Chaos was the norm. Glenn was mad. I was angry. My mother started drinking heavily. And my brother was in a rage.
The day our father was shoved into the back of a police car in Seattle, Marcus was eleven, on the cusp of adolescence. We were both scarred by the experience, but Marcus’s wounds ran deeper. He was becoming an angry, volatile teenage boy.
Around the time that my dad vanished, our oldest brother, David, distanced himself. After high school, he had played football at a community college in nearby Walla Walla, and we saw him frequently. Marcus idolized him. But now David was off playing football at Willamette College in Oregon. He had his own falling out with our father, and his way of dealing with the pain was to move on. From all of us.
Marcus took after my father—dark-haired, dark-eyed, and big. As a child, one boy teased him relentlessly. When Marcus was in seventh grade, he beat the crap out of the kid, bad enough to send him to the hospital.
With that fight, Marcus was branded. He was a tough guy, a target of local police, viewed as a threat by teachers and parents. There was another side of him too: he was a good athlete and had lots of friends in the popular crowd. He had a kind heart and would defend kids who were outcasts; every morning he gave a mentally challenged neighbor a ride to school. But Marcus never backed down from a confrontation, and by the time he got to high school, his reputation was firmly established all over town. You didn’t mess with Marcus Solo.
The violence extended into our house. I learned to fight from my battles with Marcus. We would joke that we had normal brother and sister fights, but in truth there was nothing normal about them. We pushed and punched and kicked and scratched and screamed insults into each other’s faces. He hurt me; he hurt things I loved. He would take my pet rat, Stinker, and throw him in the street or drop him from the second story onto the trampoline. I’d laugh and then scream, running to save my pet.
War was waged on physical and emotional levels. Marcus knew exactly what to say to hurt me. He called me selfish, ugly, a stuck-up bitch. He once told me I was mentally retarded, explaining that mom hadn’t ever wanted to tell me. His nicknames for me and Cheryl were Nasty and Nappy. He called us dykes, even though we were too young to know what that meant. Even though the insults were rude, I still craved the attention. Yet I tried to hurt him back. With words and with my fists. I called him fat and stupid and whatever cruel things I could think of. Marcus claims I gave worse than I got and that he simply got in trouble for retaliating. That was true, at times.
And like Marcus, I was gaining a reputation. When I was in fourth grade—the same year that Marcus pummeled the boy who had teased him—I saw a bully picking on a classmate, a nerdy kid who couldn’t defend himself. I was furious. I pushed the bully off his bike and punched him in the face. The school principal called my mother, and I was suspended from after-school sports for a few days. The boy’s family was outraged that a girl had beaten up their son.
That was the first time I remember getting in real trouble at school, the first time I remember using my fists outside my own house. But it wasn’t the last time. I was trying to prove myself to Marcus. He was not only my tormentor; he was my closest family member and my protector. He walked me home from school, kept me company, made me laugh. We were welded together, the only ones who understood the crazy shit we’d been through. We could fight each other, but pity the outsider who tried to mess with us. And the outsider in our house was Glenn.
IV.
Every time we went to Priest Lake on vacation, we returned home to some sort of disaster and drama.
One summer we got home late, the day before school was to start. I woke up to the sound of my mother screaming. Our house was on fire and she was trying to find Marcus, whose room was engulfed in flames. But Marcus was in my room: for some reason he had fallen asleep there. My mother was about to throw herself into the inferno to pull out her son when we burst out of my bedroom. I think that was a bonding moment for us, when Marcus escaped what seemed like a sure death. We made our way out of the house, wrapped in sleeping bags and trying to make sure all our animals were safe. We stood in the street and watched the house burn as firefighters tried to keep the flames away from the garage, where Glenn’s engine fuel and ammunition could have caused an explosion. The top level of the house—where my bedroom was—burned up, along with all my recently purchased school supplies and clothes.
On the first day of school, I wore one of my grandmother’s oversize T-shirts, tied up on the side. I was humiliated. The four of us moved into a horrible cheap motel room, increasing the tension exponentially.
Usually, when things got too tense, Marcus and I escaped to our grandparents’ house. Grandma Alice and Grandpa Pete lived just a few blocks away from our house on Hoxie. They had a sign by their front door: GRANDKIDS WELCOME. And they
