I don’t remember the first time Scottie hit me, but the beatings, at least my perception of them, feel like eternities in themselves. I would fight back, but at seven years old, my small and weak body would give out on me before it might ever harm a grown man. After dominating me, Scottie would laugh at me, I would grow angrier, and Royal would sit nearby, mirroring my impotence. While I grew bold in my rebellion, his resolve seemed to break. Each mile marker signaled a furthering from the pain, from a mother too tired to keep her watch, and a younger brother too small to come away with us.
My mother lay blameless in the past. She had let us go with a deep reluctance, sure of the terminal nature of the cancer that tore through her body like a raging fire. She could not know that the culprit would enter remission one day. She could not know that this would be a near-permanent goodbye, nonetheless. She’d called her childhood friends Tom and Denise, and begged them to take us in, telling the couple she was dying, and could no longer care for us. She would never again know me as a child.
My younger brother lay sleeping in the past. A four year-old child, so small in my arms the last time I hugged him. His curly mop of hair and scraggly teeth. The joy that he projected was everything of beauty in life. I could not know then what I know now. I could not conceive of the permanence of goodbyes. The scope of my reasoning was but eight years.
As Tom’s Ford Explorer carried us down the road, my older brother and I stared from the back seat at a world foreign and unbounded. The journey on the plane left Royal red-eyed with face-dried tears. His unease added to my own; though older, Royal was softer than me. Owing to my youth, I simply did not understand enough to be afraid. After all, she had miscalculated. My mother had sent us away to a place where the walls weren’t stained with the resin of ten-thousand cigarettes, or rusted junk.
This was nothing like Reno, where after a string of loser boyfriends, my mother met Scottie while working the casinos. Before Scottie had been Jim, my younger brother Sean’s father, whose kindness lasted until she got pregnant. Sean was too young to recall that Scottie had pushed Royal into a pile of plate glass once while protecting Sean, which left him with a scar on his knee. Leaving felt like abandoning him. Here, the furniture matched, the paint wasn’t chipped, and there wasn’t a useless refrigerator next to a gutted car in the yard. To our eyes it all looked foreign. Too clean, too nice. Everything we had fit into a small U-Haul hitch, and still, the soft pastel-colored bedroom Tom and Denise set up for us with two pillowed beds felt like there was too much room. We weren’t unaccustomed to such spacious softness. After the summer came and went, Tom and Denise sat me and Royal down and said they had something that they wanted to discuss. My stomach dropped. We were going back already.
Thankfully, those words never came. Instead, they asked us if we wanted to stay—we were eight and ten—dumbstruck with a sense of possibility we’d never thought possible. We cried, and then we made the call. That conversation was the hardest of my life. How do you tell your mom you don’t want to live with her any longer? With hiccuping sobs and a thousand apologies, that’s how. The conflict within me fractured a part of who I thought I was.
That call separated my life into two distinct timelines: everything before, and everything after.
