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 über-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 in the military, still had the haircut. Black hair with gray scattered through it, as if it was coming in a strand at a time, with no rhyme or reason.
The muscles jumping in his neck.
“What are you doing to Miriam?” he asked them. He set down his jacket and briefcase without taking his eyes from his boys, then moved to where I was on the carpet, lifted me to my feet.
Brian tried to answer. “Nothing, sir, we were just—”
“I heard,” their father said. “I heard everything you said.”
“But—”
“Don’t move. If you move before I come back, God as my witness, I will put you both into the hospital.”
Their father put a hand on my elbow, turned me back toward the kitchen. He set me in a chair at the table. There was perspiration on his upper lip. His hand felt like it was shaking when it let me go.
“Stay here,” Mr. Quick said.
I nodded.
He was removing the belt from his waist as he went out of the kitchen.
When he returned, the belt was again at his waist, and he was carrying a suitcase and my missing sneaker. He told me that he would get the rest of my things later, but for now he was taking me to a hotel, because he didn’t think it was fair to keep me under the same roof as those boys after what they had done, after everything that had happened. He told me that his wife would stay with me if that would make me feel more comfortable, and he told me that he was so very sorry.
Two days later I was placed with a new family.
When I left the Quicks, all I wanted was a place to stay, to be safe, and all I expected was another one of fate’s split-finger fastballs right to my head. I figured if I remained with the new family, whoever they were, for more than six months, it would be a miracle.
The new family was named Beckerman, Steven and Joan.
I was with them for almost ten years.
They had a room ready, and the first thing that made me feel like this was going to be a good thing was that it wasn’t decorated in pink. It didn’t have stuffed animals on the bed. It was a girl’s room, not a princess’s.
And it had its own stereo, a real one, not a boom box, but an old four-component Denon unit, tuner, cassette, CD, and LP, hooked to two brand-new bookshelf Bose speakers. There were headphones, already plugged to the output jack, and it was like they were sending me a message—this is yours, use it whenever you want, but remember that we’re here, too. No cautions about volume. Just, here’s the headphones, knock yourself out.