Here I am, in Edie’s house, and no one is coming to get me. My ma is forbidden from taking me out of here. I’ve been waiting to be able to have an unadulterated sleepover here my whole life.
I can picture my poppa at eight years old, in this beautiful place, the pockets of his shorts filled with all his collected objects of beauty, making drawings and sculptures, diagrams and models. I can picture him as a man, maybe moving back here and building a home with me, his kid.
Guilt singes my fantasy, flames of worry licking in from the edges. I wonder where my ma is right now, what she’s thinking, how she’s coping with this. I hope she’s not hurting herself, drinking too much, breaking things. I can only imagine how she feels speared by my betrayal.
The thought of her pain makes me cry. I never wanted to hurt her. I just wanted to leave.
Tears usher me into an uncomfortable, exhausted sleep.
Olivia, my fragile mensch of an aunt, comes to rescue me. She and I have always had a bond. I make her laugh so much she can’t breathe, and she has the admirable habit of actually listening to people when they talk. Her nervousness used to make me nervous, but now I want to help her out of it.
Olivia recoils from physical contact. She was the most timid of the three Tillett kids, the middle between two loud male personalities. No one even noticed she was nearly blind until she was nine years old. So overshadowed was she by her brothers’ rambunctiousness, the family assumed she was just clumsy when she would walk into things, not see who was in the room, or read poorly. This drove her to an inner sanctuary that she carried into adulthood. Her brain operates at a high frequency, and her words are pointed and wise, but they swirl within the tower of her nervous energy as she fidgets with cigarettes and drinks, objects of relief from the relentless electrical storm around her emotional and intellectual isolation.
I, in my semisavage ways, can be a challenge for her, I know this, but she takes me on with a loyalty that makes me want to cry. Here, in my moment of need, Olivia rescues me, even if she is writing her Ph.D. thesis and struggling to pay the rent on her tiny apartment. If she has a floor, it is mine to sleep on.
On the third night, I call. I want to go to my dad, of this I am one thousand percent certain. I just wish there was a way to do it without destroying my ma. Renee, Sarah, and Ben have expressly forbidden contact with her, but I can’t not reach out to her. I need to tell her I’m okay.
She doesn’t pick up, so I leave her a message, telling her I’m doing fine, I’m staying with Olivia. I’m not in foster care, and she’s treating me well. Please don’t worry.
The next day there’s a voice mail when I get home from school, telling me about three auditions I have coming up. She tells me she’s going to leave my audition scripts at Broadway Dance and I have to pick them up.
I feel like there’s still a leash on me, but I have some lead now. The collar is looser.
The government gives Olivia a check for taking custody of me. We go to Old Navy and I spend all of it on boxers, jeans, T-shirts, and sweaters. I’ve never had a shopping spree like this, and it’s thrilling to wear new clothes. I buy a pair of Timberlands and a red Yankees hat. I am painting a vision of myself as I want to be.
Olivia takes me to the movies and to see WNBA games. She buys me a jersey from my favorite player and gets me big jugs of soda. We hang out with her girlfriend and eat Chinese takeout in front of the TV. It’s my dream, and it seems like she genuinely just wants me to have a little respite. She wants me to be happy.
I tell her I’ve been trying to reach my ma and she nods quietly, stubbing out her filterless cigarette. She has compassion for the situation.
The court has mandated that I go to see a psychologist, so Olivia takes me down to Midtown in her red convertible. She’s too nervous to drive a car in the city, but she has it anyway. She’s constantly stalling out in traffic and hitting the brakes too hard. I love it, riding around with the top down, like gangsters, with the cherry-red exterior and white leather insides.
The shrink is a balding, overweight guy behind a desk in the back corner of a fluorescent-lit office. I hate him from the first second I sit down. He says something to the effect of “so why are you pretending to be a boy?” and my brain shuts off. I roll my eyes, lean way back in my chair, arms crossed, and stay that way for the rest of the hour. Clearly, this guy is dumb. He says I have something called “gender dysmorphia” and he wants to address it. He can address the back of my head.
In the elevator, Olivia says she’s gonna see if they’d be all right with her taking me to see her shrink. I say it’s okay that people don’t understand my gender thing. She heaves a big sigh. She doesn’t want me to get hurt by these morons.
FINALLY, MY MA AND I SPEAK. She is stoic in her fury, telling me about a new lover she met on the street, Gus, her Puerto Rican “dark angel,” a musician from the Bronx who is going to help her conquer all this. She is blaming everyone for this situation except me.
I go to school every day, but it’s nearing the end of the year and I’ve missed so much I’m going to flunk out anyway, so at the end of the second week my pop says I don’t have to go anymore.
The more free time I have to sit around the house and be demanding, the more Olivia and I fight. I know I’m driving her nuts, I know I’m not an easy kid, but some part of me thinks that’s my right after all this bullshit.
One day we’re in the car on the way to her shrink’s office and we get in a screaming match about the seat belt. I don’t want to put it on and she won’t drive if I’m not wearing it. I’m trying to outwit her, but she loses it and I jump out into the street. She peels away, leaving me standing there, my body throbbing with the burn of abandonment that is pervading my whole existence.
Poppa shows up and Olivia tells him she can’t do it anymore, he has to make another arrangement. He and his girlfriend, Julia, are the creative directors of a modern dance company, which is now the big-time ballet company of the state theater in some small city in Germany, and they’ve got a premier coming up that he has to go back for in a week. I beg him to stay. I tell him I’m desperate to go with him. This whole situation is horrible, and can’t he stay with me. He says he wishes, but he has to go. He’s going to set something up so I’m not stranded, but for now, he’s here, and he’s fighting to get custody of me himself.
My poppa is pure magic. Everything he touches turns into an adventure. He is a walking imagination. Every tree branch is a character, every cloud a face, every building a cartoon, and every leaf dances with him. We take cabs across town and go to the movies. We cook food and read great books. I laugh so much my stomach hurts, and I am high on the fantasy of getting to live with him.
Poppa goes and meets with Sarah and Ben. They tell him how everything went down, what the plan is with the neglect charges against my ma, and they ask him to come back for a formal interview the next day. He is optimistic that night at dinner, which makes me feel like there is wind in our sails, but when he comes back from the interview his face is dark. He says they turned everything around and accused him of neglect. They asked him if he thought my ma was an unfit parent, and because he refused to bad-mouth her they said he was complicit and questioned whether he was a fit parent. They will file charges against him the next day.
This is really bad. I never imagined that Sarah and Ben could turn against both of my parents. This information stuns me. The idea of being stuck in the foster system makes me nauseous.
We are at Edie’s big marble slab table, having dinner with her and Olivia. They can’t see the sink in me, but Poppa says not to worry. He’s already got a lawyer and he’s gonna get this shit all straightened. Olivia gets stressed out and angry. Edie tries to keep the peace. She says she’ll pay for the lawyer if that would help. Poppa thanks her profusely. Then he has to leave.
A few days later, we pack up my stuff and Olivia takes me back over to Edie’s, where she introduces me to her friend April. She tells me April will be living on the top
floor of Edie’s house with me, while all the rest of the shit sorts itself out. I don’t get it. Who is this woman? Olivia pulls me aside and tells me April is a friend of her girlfriend’s who needs a place to live, and has graciously agreed to take care of me in exchange for the place.
I can’t believe this. I’m devastated. I ask Olivia why I can’t go home with her. That swimming, lonely, despondent belly feeling overpowers my senses again. She says she has to finish school and she’s working like crazy and the apartment is too small. I know this means I’m too difficult for her. I fucked that up by being a disobedient punk.
I cry violently. I feel absolutely alone. Olivia doesn’t want me at her place, Edie is too fragile for me to stay with her, I’m not allowed to go to my house. Where the fuck is home? I feel like I’m floating in cold slime, immersed in a bath of silent solitude.
Why did no one intervene in this shit earlier? Why does no one want me? Where am I gonna go now?
I check in with my ma regularly, calling to say hi and tell her I’m okay. Mostly I get her answering machine, but occasionally she picks up. One morning I catch her, but her aggression makes me quiet. My strategy is to wait it out. I let her rant for a few minutes about how they shouldn’t feed me shit, until she wears herself down, or gets bored, and says she has to go. I’m silent when we hang up, and I don’t cry until I get back into my bed in the room with the blinds drawn and the door closed.
The summer is a tug of power between April and me. I obsessively worry about my ma, calling her every day when I wake up and when I go to sleep, checking that she’s not freaking out. Of course I know she is and that there’s nothing I can do about it, but I want to at least help scab that wound.
The loneliness is so thick it makes me feel sick. I have a gnawing fear of my pop not winning the case. I start to spin out on the wreckage of possible futures.
July is really touch and go. The city is lobbing all kinds of curveballs at us. Olivia and Pop fight, Olivia and Edie get into it, Edie and I have it out. The stress of the whole thing makes everyone’s threads come loose.
My aunt Alice ends up getting on the stand in early August, eight months pregnant, to do the craziest thing anyone has ever done for me. She knows, I know, we all know what my ma is like with loyalty. Once you cross her, you’re dead to her, no matter who you are. So when Alice gets up there and says she thinks my ma is an unfit mother, she sacrifices her sister, banished forever to be a ghost pain in place of a life companion.
Olivia is struck by this show of loyalty to me. She and Alice, finding themselves in something of a refugee camp, called on to perform an impossibly painful act of duty, form a bond that will last many years to come.
To add to the misery of it all, my ma’s “dark angel” reveals himself to be a piece of shit. He’s an out-of-control drunk with a violent streak. I don’t fully understand this at first, but pieces of stories she tells me about him are at odds with each other. She has never been known to lie to me, so I sense she is trying to protect me from something. I grow to hate him quickly. I so badly want him to have her back in this awful situation, to be a pillar for her, since I can’t, but it looks like he just bleeds her of her last few dollars and calls her shitty names for not offering them more easily. They swing between marriage proposals and death threats with such regularity it dizzies me. By August first I have vowed to kill him.
There is no pervasive sense that everything will be okay; everything could go either way. I’ve never been in love, but I would guess that the desperate attachment I feel to my poppa would compare. When he comes around I become filled with light, smiling, giddy, joyous, a different person. I am crushed by him leaving, every single time he pulls away in a cab or walks off down the street. He is jovial and brings stories of great adventures he’s been on and places he wants to take me, trying to keep my spirits up, but I’m too weighted by the gravity of the whole thing to fall for it completely. I am possessed by worry.
IT’S LATE on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of August. The phone rings through the entire house and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.
I pause my game of solitaire on April’s computer and listen as Edie shuffles across the floor and picks up. I lean back in my chair, straining toward the open door.
It’s muffled, but I can hear her having a short conversation with someone before she calls out in her pseudo-British accent.
“iO? It’s for you!”
Adrenaline speeds through my system as I leap out of the chair, but I slow when I get to the top of the stairs. Something tells me that this is serious. Something tells me this is scary.
I take each step with consequence, holding the black painted railing in my left hand. I am aware of my heart in my chest. I am aware of my cargo shorts and my Jordans, and my Old Navy T-shirt.
The receiver is on its side on a slab marble end table, in front of a wall-sized mirror. The hold button blinks red. I look at it for a few seconds before I press it.
“Hello?
“Bugsy! It’s me! We did it! We won!”
Poppa’s elation is so beautiful.
“Bugsy? Hello?”
“Hi. I’m here.”
“We did it! You’re officially legally in my custody, kiddo! Are you excited?!”
I genuinely thought that I would be, but I’m so worried about her.
“Is my ma okay?”
He sighs, pausing.
“She’s okay. I think . . . you know . . . she left with her lawyer right away, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to her . . . but I think she’s okay.”
What is “okay”? How could she be okay in a situation like this? She is a shell, a ruin. A ship wrecked on a solitary island, its beautiful bow smashed in with no one left alive to fix it.
This notion sends my belly into my feet. I have to sit down on the cold stone floor. Poppa says he’s coming home to celebrate. When we hang up I put my face in my hands and start to cry.
Is this really what I wanted? Is my freedom worth this impossible cost? Did I really understand the weight of the planets I was shifting when I set this thing into motion? Certainly not.
Where does certainty come from in the face of such monumental, impossibly huge risk? How can one ever know that the leap they are taking is the right one until it has been taken? What compass guides you if not your gut instincts? How am I meant to process such an equation?
The only thing I have is my gut, and despite the tearing feeling it has now, it never wavered.
Chapter 29
The Escape
Karlsruhe, Germany, August 1998
LATE ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 26 WE TAKE A TAXI TO JFK airport. I feel like James Bond, arriving at this late hour with everything I own in two army duffel bags. From the second we get out of the cab until the plane actually lifts off the ground, I can’t help but glance over my shoulder every few minutes, expecting someone to intervene.
My father is calm, mellow in his laid-back way, shirt unbuttoned to the chest, skinny in his Levi’s. He has a piece of red string on his wrist, left over from a tour through India, and he charms the pretty agent at the ticket counter with his intelligent humor. His passport is thick with visas and he knows his way around the airport by heart. He doesn’t speak to me like a child, he treats me as an equal, just with a guiding hand. I’m nervous, but I try not to show it so he doesn’t think of me as a little kid.
I’m turning thirteen in less than a week. My second godfather, Poppa’s best friend of twenty years, rented a big villa outside of Rome, so after a few days in Germany we’re going there to visit him and celebrate my birthday.
I’m asleep for my first drive through pop’s German town, Karls-ruhe. Poppa shakes my shoulder gently when we pull up at an ornate green metal gate and says we’re home.
The sky is blue with a haze of white, bright with summer sun. Pop’s girlfriend, Julia, waves from a small balcony at an upstairs window, then comes down to help us carry the luggage. She’s sugar sweet, a ballerina from North
Carolina with a high-pitched voice and a big smile. She sweeps me into a hug and tells me how happy she is that I made it. This feels nice.
The building smells like warmth. It’s hard to describe, but it’s a mixture of things that make up what I’ve always imagined a home to smell like—blankets and soup, flowers and soap, babies and hot porridge.
The apartment is trimmed with beautiful wood and flooded with sunlight. Immediately I think of my ma, how sun is all she ever wants in an apartment. I feel guilty that now I’ll have it, and she’s still there in the darkness. I push the thought away.
Julia is bubbling with excitement to give me a tour. Showing hospitality gives her joy.
The place never seems to end. She starts in the kitchen, tiled in white and black checkers, dishes clean and drying on a rack. I notice this with admiration. It smells like food is actually cooked here. There’s a balcony in the back that looks out over a garden in which the downstairs neighbors have hung their laundry up on a line. Ma makes fun of things like this, domesticated paradises. I like it. The hanging laundry makes me feel soft like cotton inside.
The bathroom has a big wooden door and a tub of equal proportion. I think of Ma’s incessant bathing and how much she would love a bath like this, sprawling and clean.
Their room is like every other bedroom Pop has ever had: a low bed surrounded by books and pretty objects. Art scattered around the walls and beautiful lamps he designed. I feel funny looking at the dresser. I fetishize such objects of organization. It almost feels weird to be standing so close to one.
The living room is the size of our whole apartment in New York. It’s big and open, with almost no furniture in it. I ask if the TV sitting against one wall actually works. “Yeah!” Julia says. I ask if I’m allowed to watch it, and she says of course I am. My head starts to tingle.
Finally, the crown jewel—my room. I can barely believe the size of it. It’s so big it has two doors, one to the main hallway and one to the living room. The ceilings are fifteen feet high, and it’s as bright as a greenhouse.
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