Prologue
Whenever I read stories about girls my age, I would wonder what had happened to my childhood. Sometimes it seems I was born and now here I am, Cathy Carson, seventeen. All the years before are blurred as if my memories had been kept on old film that spoiled. Faces and names, places and events, no matter how important they were at the time, are smudged and splotched so that nothing is
recognizable. Of course, I know why. I don't want to remember, not after all that has happened, not after what my father did to me.
He's out of our lives, but he's not gone. He's never far away. All I have to do is close my eyes and there he is again, smiling, speaking softly, telling me how pretty I am, and then touching me, doing it all under the guise of his special lessons that would give me an advantage over other girls my age.
I shudder just the way I would if ice dripped down my back. Then I shake my head hard to rattle the images and stop the flow of pain. It goes away, and for a while, I am safe.
After having spent months and months with my therapist, Doctor Marlowe, and after being with the other Orphans With Parents, Jade, Star, and Misty, in group therapy, I was able to get back into the world. I had finished my junior year at St. Jude's High School and completed the group therapy. I was supposed to have a follow-up session, but it hadn't been scheduled yet.
When our group sessions ended, I really didn't believe that the other girls wanted to be friends and keep in touch, even though we all said so and Jade took everyone's telephone number. We had all revealed so many intimate secrets to each other. Sometimes, sharing such things ties people together tightly, binds them in knots that are almost impossible to break. Each revelation is like another string wrapping around our hearts, binding us together forever.
But sometimes, after you realize what you have revealed, you can't face the listener again. It's embarrassing to know that when she looks at you, she sees your pain and your humiliation. You turn away. You wish she would go away, and you don't try to make contact. You are eager to turn her back into a stranger. You might even see each other somewhere, gaze blankly into each, other's faces, and pretend you didn't see each other.
Half of me hoped that would happen, but the other half, the half that longed for friends and kindred spirits, hoped it wouldn't. No one but my father, who had his reasons, ever kept a promise to me. I didn't expect the girls would keep theirs. Each of them had her own problems, and each was surely occupied and distracted.
Misty Foster's mother and father had a bad divorce and her father was in a romance with a much younger woman. Her mother was trying to see other men, but was still quite self-absorbed with her pursuit of youth and beauty, and poor Misty felt so alone, she came up with the idea of calling herself and the rest of us Orphans With Parents, or the OWP's. It was a funny idea, but after a while, I liked it because I had never belonged to any organization or club, had never been in a play or on a team. It wasn't the sort of club membership anyone would want, but at least there was a sense of togetherness, something shared
Star Fisher lived with her grandmother Pearl Anthony, her mother's mother, and her eight-year-old brother, Rodney, after her father had first deserted the family and then her mother had run off with a boyfriend. Yet Star was still the proudest and, in some ways, strongest of the four of us. I was afraid of her when we first met. She seemed so hard and even mean, but after I heard her story and she heard ours, she seemed to soften, even become protective of me and the others. In so many ways, I wanted to be like her.
And then there was the official president of our club, Jade Lester, a beautiful and rich girl who lived in a Beverly Hills mansion. Her parents treated her like another possession, an asset over which to battle during their nasty divorce. They were two strong and independent people. Her father was a famous and successful architect and her mother was an executive in a cosmetic company who guarded her career with a passion, even refusing to permit her parental responsibilities to interfere with climbing the corporate ladder. At the time we ended our group therapy, her parents were approaching some sort of compromise over custody, but had still not reached it.
As bad as my story was, I ended up feeling sorry for each of them. They seemed to feel sorrier for me than they did for themselves, and they didn't even know the whole truth about my family.
Family is such a strange word to apply to my situation. I had been adopted, but I had not discovered that until after my father began forcing himself on me. It was really the other girls who had made me question why my mother had wanted to adopt a child in the first place. She never seemed comfortable with me and hated the responsibilities that came along with being a mother. I had wondered what had made her want me, but not with the passion and the need the girls instilled in me. Finally, I confronted my mother and forced her to tell me the truth, or what I disovered was the sordid truth.
I was not really her adopted daughter. I was her half sister. Our mother had had some sort of love affair and had become pregnant in her forties. My half sister had been pressured into getting married to Howard Carson, and then pressured again into adopting me. There was still a great deal I didn't know, but that revelation was enough to make me feel sick to my stomach and even more un- wanted and confused.
What was I? Who was I? To learn that you were a regretted mistake, a sin, an embarrassment, is horrible, but I still had to know more.
My half sister Geraldine (I have great difficulty now thinking of her as my mother) always warned me about getting too close to the truth. She claimed it doesn't set you free. She said, "It's like too much of any good thing. It puts you in a darker place. Don't ask so many questions."
One time when I pursued one of my endless lines of questions, telling her I had to know the truth, that the truth was important, Geraldine responded by asking me, "What if you were horribly ugly, but you lived in a world without reflections, no mirrors, no way to see yourself and know? Would you be better off if someone brought you a mirror and showed you your face? That's the truth, too, and all it brings is pain."
Was she right? Had I forced her to hold up a mirror? Was my pain my own doing? Maybe that was why she hated mirrors and caring about your looks, why she criticized most women for being narcissistic, why she censored my books and magazines when I was younger and wouldn't permit me to watch certain television programs, why she practically spit at some commercials, and why she wanted me to do all that I could to hide my breasts when they began to develop much too early.
Or maybe there was another reason, a deeper reason, one that she feared even more than the truths she had already revealed. Our house was full of secrets, unspoken dark thoughts that hovered in corners or lived like insects under rugs and in locked closets. Should I take them out? Should I do what she warned me not to do? Should I continue to cling to silence, to look away, to close my eyes?
I remembered how Star described her fantasy world, her magic carpet to take her away from her unhappiness. I was never able to do that. Makebelieve was always too difficult, too thin, and easily shattered by Geraldine's voice or look. It was like a balloon that started to lift me away and always exploded or leaked its air and brought me down bard, planting me firmly in my loneliness.
Clocks ticked, day turned to night and then to day. I moved through my responsibilities as if I had been hypnotized, mechanically, never feeling any excitement, surprised at the sound of my own laughter, if it ever came, and even surprised by my own tears and sobs.
After Geraldine had reluctantly told me part of the truth, I felt even lighter, less substantial, more alienated and alone. I stared out of my wind
ow at the street and watched the cars go by, wondering who everyone was and where everyone was going. I was also looking for a sign of my stepfather. He loomed forever and ever out there.