I Forgave You Anyway Read online

  As a child, my Grandmother was my world. She took me bowling and showed me how to crochet. I’d often tag along on her newspaper routes, delivering advertisements for our small town. I’ll never forget the smell of the ink as the giant paper rolls churned on their belts, the men and women smiling and greeting us, exclaiming about the cold and the stale donuts that the local bakery had put out that morning. I felt like a grownup with my mug of coffee and heavy bag of newspapers making my boots sink into the powdery snow.

  I loved the night air and the way the streetlamps would make the snowflakes glitter. It was an eerie sort of silence as the town slept, but Grandma and I were awake, her boots making footprints for me to step into, and her smile reminding me that someone loved me. She and Grandpa Blue lived one street over, a home I could escape to through the fence at the end of the street. I’d often imagine the fence was a magical gate like I’d read about in the book, The Secret Garden. It became a portal out of my Mother’s grasp and into fairyland, ruled by my kindly fairy Godmother and the gentle Geppetto.

  My Grandpa Blue would come home from his long hours at the local processing plant smelling of glue and smoke, ruffling my hair, saying, “Hey there Pete,” as I’d run to the refrigerator, grabbing onion dip as soon as I’d notice a bag of potato chips dangling from his hand. We’d sit together, watching the Tigers baseball game, while I inhaled mounds of dip, snuggling up to his scruffy face with adoration. My Grandpa could be a grumpy old man at times. I think that’s why Grandma and I found the movie, Dennis the Menace, so hilarious. Unlike Dennis, I knew better than to annoy my Grandpa, but for some reason, he took to me, despite my constant prattle.

  I loved to follow him into his workshop, and let him show me his wood working tools, or help him feed his collection of rabbits and chickens in the shed. The first fall I could help my Grandparents make Christmas wreaths was a very proud moment for me. While some kids wanted video games or the latest Hansen Brothers CD, I wanted to be allowed to upgrade from spray painting pinecones and loading the woodstove to using the wreath clamp and ribbon machine.

  I had a wild imagination, playing in the woods that surrounded our out-of-the-city-limits neighborhood. My Mother married my Stepfather, Raymond, after they found out she was pregnant with my brother Ben. I don’t remember much about their wedding, just a snapshot of my Mother smiling, sitting in my Grandma’s kitchen as a woman wove lavender flowers into her hair.

  She was quite beautiful, with her thick, wavy black hair. Her porcelain skin always had a touch of pink on her cheeks, and emerald green sparkled in her blue eyes. Her dress had been a simple light flowery pattern.

  I was stuck wearing funny little white socks with the lace on them. I don’t remember where my little sister Emma was, since she would have been just toddler at the time. With my Mother marrying Raymond, I was gaining two stepbrothers. Ray Jr. who was six years older than me. R.J. was quiet and secretive, while Eric, the youngest, quickly became my fidgety sidekick with his mischievous blue eyes egging on my hair-brained schemes.

  The wedding ring my new stepdad had given my Mother was a simple gold band with a tiny, single twinkling diamond. Either way, my Mom was getting married, and things were better than they had been in years. Emma and I had just returned home from foster care. We’d been placed with a foster family close by, but since I was old enough to remember my Mother, I’d missed her deeply. I never quite understood why she was gone, or when she would return. I just knew that I lived with a nice lady, who took care of me and Emma.

  Our foster parents Darlene and Tom were a sweet older couple, with a nice home built on the outskirts of town. There were pear and cherry trees in their back yard and a mysterious neighbor girl I’d met that would drink her own pee to impress me and the other foster kids.

  Despite all the good I tried to find around me, my reality was that I’d been left without a Mother, without a Father, and that Emma was my only connection to a past I could barely remember. Some victims of the system have true horror stories about their foster parents. Thankfully, mine was not. Tom and Darlene were the parents of a beautiful teenage girl, who was by far the coolest and prettiest girl I’d ever met, and one adopted daughter who was close in age to myself; sweet and kind Willa.

  It wasn’t until I was an adult that someone told me Willa’s story. She’d been found by Child Protective Services at the age of four, unable to walk from being confined to her crib, emaciated from neglect and lack of nutrition. Her parents had fed her on a diet consisting of soda and Kool-Aid, which had been apparent from the dirty bottles found by the case worker who rescued her from her bleak future.

  Darlene was a good woman and an even better Mother. She made me wash my hands before dinner and was never cruel. She was very close with Emma and my sister couldn’t have had a better care giver. At some point Darlene decided to put me in therapy. I had a vivid imagination and would swear I saw fairies to anyone who would ask. Darlene took this as an indication that I might benefit from seeing a professional. Someone who might be able to help me deal with reality. I remember my therapist being a large, kind man with glasses and a graying beard.

  “Anna, can you paint me a picture?” He’d ask me in his deep, husky voice.

  I’d spend the whole hour painting rainbows and butterflies and walk out with a tootsie roll treat.

  “She’s completely normal,” he’d reported to my foster Mother at the end of our six-week evaluation. “She has a very active imagination, but I’m sure she’ll grow out of it.”

  Thankfully, I never did.

  Willa and I made great playmates, splashing in the kiddie pool Darlene had filled for us on the front porch.

  “Willa, I can see fairies, you know,” I’d say to her.

  “They live in flowers and trees, right?” She’d reply, her freckles standing out against her opaque eyes.

  “Yes, and they come through the windows at night, to check on us, just like I told my Mommy,” I’d smile back.

  Willa never had a mean bone in her body, and she made the perfect companion. She and I discovered static electricity together, rubbing our Strawberry Shortcake nightgowns on our heads, then diving under the covers to watch the magical sparkles, noting the pungent odor of charged electrons.

  For many years, I didn’t know why I was sent to foster care in the first place. I had my loving Grandparents, and Emma and I also had our biological Father in our lives. Later, it was explained to me that my Grandmother was going through a treatment plan, Alcoholics Anonymous to be exact.

  I was too little to understand the complexity of addiction, and the grief that fueled it in my Grandmother. Alcohol was the one thing that had numbed years of abuse my Grandma had endured from her ex-husband, “The Silver-Tongued Devil.” It had also been the medicine that dulled the memory of two of her children that walked with the angels, their young lives cut short.

  Her daughter Hannah had been taken to Heaven after a shed she’d been playing in caught fire, decades before I was born.

  “You’re my little Hannah,” Grandma would tell me, a wellspring of tears hidden behind the joy that I brought her.

  I suppose she felt that God had given her another chance to raise a little girl after Hannah had been so cruelly ripped away from her. Over the years, I pieced together the story through her own words.

  “I’m not sure what I was doing, maybe I was in the house reading. I always loved to read,” she’d say, her eyes far away. “Anyway, Hannah was playing outside, must have been a really hot day. . . she’d been in the shed. The police tried to figure out how it caught fire, but no one ever did. . . It was your Uncle Brian who found her. She was on fire. They didn’t teach us stop, drop and roll like they do now, so she just ran like that. She ran, and the wind made the fire worse. Brian was the one who put the fire out. Your Grandpa was away, probably with some other woman. We only had one car, so we had to carry her. Brian carried her to the road.”

  With that, she’d light a cigarette and that was it. It woul
d be years until I’d hear more. My Grandma still doesn’t speak often of Hannah’s death. It left a hole only those who have lost a child could understand. As a child, I heard whispers about her, and occasionally my Grandma would chuckle and leak a memory or two, but the pain was still as raw for her as it ever had been. She told me how once Hannah had gotten up in the middle of the night, not knowing my Grandma was there, awake in the dark. She’d gotten up to rinse out her one pair of stockings in the laundry bucket by the sink after having an accident during the night.

  Grandma told me she wished more than anything in that moment that she could have provided better for her children, and that she would forever cherish that small moment of Hannah’s short life. Sometimes I would have dreams about Hannah. Dreams I was afraid to tell anyone, because saying her name aloud seemed like taboo in my family. In one dream, I walked through a patch of woods near my home, and came to a house that stood there, half scorched. Firemen walked through the tall weeds, putting out the flames. A small pink casket lay on the ground with a white silhouette inside, its glass lid slightly fogged and blurring the features of the body inside. I looked to my left, and there was Hannah, red cotton overalls and a white blouse, rag curls and a solemn expression. She was pointing towards the casket. It was the sort of dream you never forget.

  Just like my Grandma could never forget the reality of her little girl, asking only for her teddy bear before she took her last breaths in this world and crossed over to the next.

  Chapter 7: Tattoos and Taboos

  I think I was about seventeen when I first saw the tattoo. A faded skull etched around a deep scar on my Uncle’s stomach. I’d seen it before, but I’d never noticed my Mother’s name scrawled in worn ink at its base.

  “Why is my Mom’s name on that tattoo?” I’d asked my Uncle Ross.

  He was one of my Grandma’s youngest, and one of my favorites. He’d write me letters, trying to teach me the Ottawa language. His dorky laugh could make even the sourest of people smile.

  “Oh that?” he chuckled. “Your Mom did that.”

  “Did what? The tattoo?” I asked, perplexed.

  He always liked to pull my leg, so I never knew when he was being serious or joking.

  “No silly, the scar. See that scar there?” He said, pointing to the skull.

  It was distorted, but an old gash remained under the ink.

  “Yeah,” I laughed nervously. “She probably stabbed you because you’re so annoying.”

  His eyebrows raised, and he looked away quickly.

  Oh shit. I’d called a bingo.

  “What? Oh my gosh! No, she didn’t?!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes, she did, and I almost died too,” he said nonchalantly.

  “Holy Shit! When?!” I exclaimed again.

  “Hey, watch your mouth young lady. I can still spank you,” he said, trying to hide his smile.

  He was indefinitely proud of my foul mouth but didn’t want to show it.

  “Sorry,” I said automatically. “But seriously, tell me. No one ever tells me stuff,” I said dejectedly.

  He lit his second cigarette and started to talk. “Welp, it went like this: she and Grandma got into an argument, and your Mom went after Grandma. She had her pinned up against the wall, choking her.” He paused, fiddling with a screwdriver. “So, I stepped in, and pulled her off, and next thing I know, she’d run me clean through.”

  “Oh my gosh,” I stuttered. “With a kitchen knife?” I asked.

  “Yeah, she grabbed it off the counter, stuck it in my gallbladder, and then threw it in the woods.” He laughed, “I told you she’s crazy.”

  He seemed to take this all lightly. My family was more messed up than I’d thought, or maybe more loving than I’d thought.

  Why wasn’t my Mother in prison?

  “Lost my gallbladder, but I’m still here,” he said quietly. “We were all drinking, and she was already pissed off, smashing beer bottles in the sink.”

  I figured maybe my Mom had been upset about Grandma drinking. I’d heard Grandma wasn’t always the nicest when she drank, although I’d never seen it myself.

  “So, she stabbed you. Didn’t the cops come?” I asked, trying to understand.

  “Yeah, they did, and Grandma and I told them it was an accident. They found the knife in the woods, and your Ma in the tub, hiding or something. I don’t think she meant to hurt me. That’s what family does. We protect our own,” he said.

  I was completely baffled. My Mother could have spent her life in prison, and my Uncle could be dead. Things must have been so crazy back then, it made life now seem boring, but at least safer I supposed.

  “So, is that why I went to foster care?” I asked.

  He looked down, avoiding my eyes, then grinned uncomfortably.

  “Your Mom had a choice. It was either rehab or jail. She chose rehab, so you and your sister went to foster care, Grandma went to AA, and I went to the tattoo shop.”

  We stood there in his garage with nothing more to say, so I snuffed out my cigarette, cracked open a beer and tossed him a corn hole bag.

  Chapter 8: Stepping Back

  I think the first time I really felt something was wrong with my Mother was about age six or seven. My brother Ben was very small, and as early memories go, I really couldn’t say what I’d done to provoke her anger, all I remember was watching it happen in the mirror that hung on the wall behind us.

  I remember seeing my own eyes flood with confusion and fear and then with terror and betrayal. She’d lifted me up off my small feet, fistfuls of my shirt in her hands, her teeth sinking down hard. She bit down, leaving me with purple teeth marks on my right cheek. I remember looking at the marks in the mirror a while after she had shut herself away somewhere, probably smoking a cigarette and finding a way to cope with what she had just done. There wasn’t any blood, just two semi circles, like a wimpy bite from a discarded apple. I cried, but I was also convinced Mommy must be sorry. I’d obviously done something bad, and if I could just stop upsetting her, maybe she wouldn’t get so out of control. After all, she always reminded me how she not only had me to worry about, but my sister, a baby and my two stepbrothers. She seemed particularly angry towards my new stepbrothers, Ray Jr. and Eric.

  Personally, I was happy, because more kids meant more fun. My little sister thought that R.J. would make a good boyfriend and I thought Eric made a good minion. It was a strange thing to acquire a stepbrother. R.J. was a full 6 years older than me, and eight years older than my sister. He was cute for a boy, but then again, I was at the age where boys still had cooties. I wasn’t sure how to be a sister to a boy I didn’t really know, but my Mom assured me that in time, we would all share the same last name and that we would become a family. It took Emma a little longer to realize that R.J. couldn’t be her boyfriend and me being the little brat that I was, teased her endlessly.

  Emma was a very sensitive child. My Mom often told us that she’d been a difficult baby. She’d been born with infant onset asthma and had hated her breathing treatments, fighting our Mom every second she had to sit still with the nebulizer in her face. She feared the dark, the woods, dogs, bears, wolves, eggs and even hotdogs. More than any of those things, Emma feared our Mother.

  Usually aloof and carefree, she played quietly for hours with her teddy bears and dolls while I would pick out their eyes, cut their hair, and then become bored of them. Something about those little googly eyes watching me just creeped me out, but not Emma. She loved them, especially this porcelain nightmare my Aunt Jesse had given her. It had a teddy bear for a body and the face of a baby, if you could even call it a baby. It looked like something out of a Goosebumps tale with its teeth bared and wide eyes knocking around its hollow head. The memory of it still gives me the shivers.

  My relatives probably thought I hated Emma. I teased her mercilessly, making up names like mealy-worm, bean nose nozzle and the worst and most shameful: pig nose. She had been born with the cutest little button nose that had four freckl
es right on the tip. I took it as an opportunity to let her know that she probably inherited it from her most hated animal food group; a porcine snub. Yes, I was a jerk, but I did it for my own reasons and I had my own fair share of names my new stepbrothers gave me as well, like Wendy whiner and butt face. However, poor Emma was just like her name: delicate and sensitive.

  I was afraid my Mother would ruin her, shattering her innocence with her keen knack for knowing our deepest fears and then using them to manipulate our sense of security. In truth, Emma always reminded me of one of my favorite story book characters. With her pearly skin, dark hair, thick lashes and gentle soul, she was just like Princess Snow White from the worn pages of my book.

  She needed to be protected. If I was going to help her, I’d have to toughen her up. I teased her so she could learn to take the very real humiliation I felt my Mother would eventually slather on her sensitive psyche. Next, I taught her to read, so she could escape with me into other worlds. Worlds with heroes, hope, and magic. We’d spend hours telling each other tall tales about Thumbelina and the fairies that lived in the forest surrounding our house. Like Snow White and Rose Red, we would live in our world of magic, protected from the rages of the Queen.

  Fairies were something I truly believed in. I made up their names, sang songs to draw them out of their Fairy bowers and would build them homes out of moss and twigs, leaving soda caps of milk and honey out on stone tables, decorating them with wildflowers. My Mom didn’t seem to mind that part of my fantasy. She’d smile at the little random piles of junk I’d sculpted into welcoming hollows for my Fairy friends. I figured she didn’t mind because the magic had its way of infiltrating even the darkest of times. I remember once I begged her to buy me a used potpourri burner with honeysuckle oil. (Fairies happen to love honeysuckle; in case you didn’t know.) I’d imagine that little elves would crawl through my open window at night, drawn by the aroma, to fix my shoes or trade shells and buttons with the Borrowers that lived in the floorboards. Together they’d set traps to capture the little troll that had taken up residence in the hole behind my bedroom door.