by Allie Gail
Unconventional Scars
By Allie Gail
Kindle Edition
Copyright September 2012 Allie Gail
Cover Design by Laura Shinn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any printed or electronic form without permission.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or any place, event or occurrence, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines have been created from the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.
****
“One is easily fooled by that which one loves.” Molière, Tartuffe
PROLOGUE
Items are being thrown haphazardly into the back of the muddy Honda Civic. The trunk, the backseat are almost completely filled with boxes, loose clothing, shoes, random items. The woman, a gaunt blonde wearing too much makeup, is scurrying in and out of the low-income apartment, slinging her life’s belongings into the car with all the care of a delivery driver on the last day before retirement.
“You ready yet?” Her companion, a stocky, slightly balding man in his early forties, lights a cigarette and inhales it, looking around nervously. She makes one last trip inside, returns with her purse and a battered vanity case, and closes the apartment door. Her hand is shaking. She needs another Valium. Maybe there are some left in the bottle in the glove compartment.
“What about the girl?” she asks, though she already knows the answer. Max doesn’t like kids, even grown ones. He told her that from the start. They just get in the way, he said, they’re too damn needy. She’s inclined to agree. Anna isn’t a bad kid, though, and she feels an unwelcome twinge of guilt for what she’s about to do. But Max has more money than she’s ever seen in her life, and he’s promised to take her to Mexico where they can live like royalty on the beaches of Cancun. Is she honestly supposed to pass up an opportunity like that? Stay here in this hick town and be poor trash forever? The girl will just have to understand. After all, she isn’t a baby anymore.
“She’s old enough to take care of herself,” Max tells her irritably. “Look here, I didn’t risk everything so I could waste my time babysitting someone’s brat. Are you coming or not? I’ll feel a lot better once we’re on the road.” They’re taking her car instead of his, just in case. Although as far as he knows, nobody suspects a thing. But he isn’t taking any chances, not with so much at stake.
An elderly lady appears in the doorway of the apartment next door and says something to the blonde. The woman snaps back an abrupt answer, muttering expletives underneath her breath. Max crushes out the cigarette with his cheap knockoff Italian loafer and gets in the car. She follows, thinking not of the daughter she’s leaving behind, but of the beautiful new wardrobe Max has promised to buy her, and frozen fruity rum drinks and room service and balconies overlooking the tranquil turquoise waters of the Caribbean.
1
Life wasn’t fair.
At least, it wasn’t in the humble opinion of Anna Moore. Not that anyone ever bothered to ask her opinion – she was avoided like a rogue patch of poison ivy by the other tenth-grade students. Sometimes she wondered if they actually thought they could contract her poverty just by being in her presence or brushing against her in the hallways at school. As if her pathetic life and bleak future were somehow afflictions that might be contagious. Something airborne that required a vaccination, lest one suffer the humiliation of being labeled welfare case or scum.
Normally she was ignored, treated as some invisible ghost in worn jeans who haunted the school learning algebraic equations and world history with the rest of them, always eating lunch with her nose in a library book so she didn’t have to dwell on the fact that she was alone. Most of the time she wasn’t bothered. But occasionally there were the nasty comments from those who were lucky enough to have affluent parents, who would never know what it was like to want for anything. Like in the cafeteria today, while she was walking to an empty table with her free lunch tray.
She needs to be sterilized so she doesn’t reproduce. That’s where all my parents’ tax money is going.
She wondered what they’d say if she told them precisely where their parents’ tax money was going. A good portion of it went straight up her mother’s nose. As if they would care! It was easier to just blame her, call her trash. It was this way in every one of the five states she'd lived in, as far back as she could remember. Poverty was universal, after all. Everybody recognized it. And feared it. A better-you-than-me mentality.
Scuffling idly along the sidewalk with her schoolbooks in her arms, Anna blinked back a stray tear. Did they think it was her fault, really? Was it her fault that her mother found it more important to party than to get a job? That she left her daughter alone sometimes for days on end so she could score pills and snort cocaine with her flavor-of-the-month? That she sported designer handbags given to her as gifts from the various men she dated, some of them even married men, while her child wore salvaged rejects from a thrift store? Whose fault was that, exactly? Someone really needed to explain it.
She desperately wanted beautiful things like the other girls at school. After landing a weekend job at a fast food restaurant, she'd thought maybe she could finally buy some nice new clothes of her own. It hadn't quite worked out that way. More often than not, the money had to be spent on food or getting the electricity turned back on. When it came to paying bills, her mother was less than reliable.
Sighing, Anna dug in a pocket for her apartment key and smiled wanly at her neighbor, Miss May, who was peering out her front window with an anxious expression. Everyone called May Emerson “Miss May” and to Anna, she was a dear friend. Over the course of the past two years, the elderly woman had taught Anna how to cook, mended her clothes, given her valuable advice, and kept her company when they were both lonely. Truth be told, she was the only real friend Anna had. But now, bursting out of the apartment next door, her normally cheerful face was anything but.
“What are you doin’ here, baby girl?” She had called her young neighbor this ever since they first met. Maybe the girl was no baby, but to a woman in her eighties, anyone under the age of thirty was deemed a child.
Anna wiggled the key in the lock. Sometimes it stuck because of the rust. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? School’s out. Did you lose track of time?”
“You’re . . . I thought . . . do you know where your mama is?”
“I rarely do,” Anna replied dryly. “Why?”
“You mean you ain’t talked to her today?”
“No, I’ve been at school all day.”
May leaned weakly against the door frame and put a wrinkled hand to her chest. She looked like she might be seriously ill. “Oh, Lord,” she said, almost inaudibly.
Startled, Anna dropped her books on the doorstep and hurried over to the woman, anxiously placing a hand on her fragile arm. “Are you all right? Should I call someone?” We don’t even have a phone! What do I do? She’s having a stroke. Or a heart attack. Oh crap, do I remember anything from that CPR class last year? Think, Anna!
May turned her worried brown eyes towards the teenager’s. She hesitated a moment before answering. “I saw your mama with some man this mornin’.”
“Well, that’s hardly newsworthy. Don’t scare me like that!”
“Ain’t never seen him before. They was . . . they was packin’ up stuff and puttin’ it in her car. I asked her if y’all was movin’ away and she just said yes and left it at that . . . they seemed like they was in a hurry so I didn’t bother her no more . . . but now here you come a-walkin’ home from school just like you always do . . .”
A sickening feeling hit Anna, dropping into her stomach like a stone. She stopped
breathing. Bianca was no mother of the year, true, but surely she wouldn’t . . . she couldn’t . . . no, maybe she was just going away for a few days. She’d done that plenty of times before, disappearing to who-knows-where with some fling.
Or Miss May was mistaken. She was old, she was going senile, had early onset Alzheimer’s maybe, but there was no way . . . no way she was right . . .
“You shouldn’t be here . . . this don’t make no sense,” May continued to mumble.
Anna threw the apartment door open so hard it bounced off the interior wall. Even before she reached her mother’s bedroom, a premonition hit her with crystal clarity, and she knew already, even before she snatched open her mother’s closet door and saw stark emptiness, she knew that it was true . . .
Her mother had finally abandoned her for good.
****
Philip Moore was still in shock. He had hoped the long drive from North Carolina to Florida would clear his head but so far he still felt blindsided and stunned.
How could he possibly have seen this coming? He hadn’t seen or heard from his sister in ten years, didn’t even have a clue where she was living, and out of the blue he gets this phone call from the Bradley County police, no less, wanting to know if he had any idea where she might have gone. That she’d disappeared with a corrupt lawyer named Max Lockwood and a sizeable amount of embezzled money had gone with them. That she’d left behind her own daughter, for God’s sake, to be interrogated by the police who wanted nothing more than to find this Lockwood character. Jesus, Bianca had always been a wild one, but this was too much, even for her!
And now that poor kid, Anna, dumped like an unwanted puppy by her worthless excuse of a mother, was in a foster home in some microscopic town in Florida that he’d never even heard of, waiting to be claimed by an uncle she hadn’t seen since she was six years old. If he could get his hands on Bianca right now, he’d strangle her.
Self-absorbed, narcissistic, greedy, bleached blonde bitch!
Lisa had been equally shocked when he had called her. She wasn’t a mother herself, but she was empathetic enough not to quibble when he told her that he wanted to bring his niece back to live with him. He tried to tell himself that his life wouldn’t change drastically. This was a sixteen-year-old girl, after all, not a toddler who had to be spoon-fed and diapered and tended constantly. From what the social worker said when she filled him in on the details, Anna had spent a lot of her time alone and knew how to take care of herself. It won’t be a problem, he’d told Lisa.
Although the more he thought about it, the more the doubts cropped up. Raised by a woman like Bianca, what kind of person might her daughter have evolved into? She’d been a sweet little girl once. For a time, after Philip’s divorce, Bianca had lived with him, not because they were particularly close, but more so because she couldn’t afford her own place. Their parents had been killed by a drunk driver when he was in college and Bianca was just two months pregnant, single and twenty-one. She’d continued to live in their childhood home afterwards, until it was repossessed due to her failure to make the payments. Being the only close family she had, of course he took her in. She was only a year older than he was, but already was jaded and seemed to think the world owed her.
But her daughter, Anneliese . . . now there was a different story! Even all these years later he could visualize her, padding around the house barefoot in her pink pajamas, curls askew, clutching that Holly Hobbie doll she dragged around everywhere. She made him have tea parties with Holly and her stuffed animals, most of which he’d bought for her because he had no children of his own and besides, she had him wrapped around her tiny little finger. He’d loved her.
Inevitably, Bianca found a new boyfriend and moved in with him, dragging Anna along with her. For a while he continued to see the child, since he was a free and convenient babysitter and his sister wasn’t exactly one for staying home and baking cookies. She had the maternal instincts of a venomous spider.
Then one day they were just . . . gone. Vanished into thin air. Without a word to him, their apartment empty and deserted, and the pissed-off landlord demanding three months’ back rent. For ten years, he had no idea where his sister and niece had disappeared to. Until now.
So who had that sweet little toddler become? Had she lost all her innocence? Who knew, maybe she was tattooed and pierced all over by now. What if she was involved with drugs? She was his responsibility now – what would he do? How would he handle her if she’d turned into a reincarnation of her mother? She had Bianca’s genes, after all. That in itself was a frightening thought.
And how would something like that affect his relationship with Lisa? True, they didn’t live together, but they’d been dating for almost two years now and he thought that marriage could possibly be in their future. She was a patient, understanding person, but even an accommodating woman like Lisa wouldn’t want that kind of baggage.
Philip drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and indulged himself in flashbacks of the past. Anna, swinging at the park, shouting at her Uncle Phil to push her higher. Lying on her stomach on the floor in front of the television, quietly coloring pictures with her crayons. Orange was her favorite. God, he couldn’t believe he remembered that! Making daisy chains in the back yard out of wild Black-eyed Susans. Sick in bed with the flu, snuggled under the covers of her twin bed with Holly and requesting chocolate pudding to “make her feel better”. Climbing onto the couch beside him in the evenings and leaning her small, sleepy head against his arm. Will you read me a story?
He treated her as if she was his own daughter. What else could he do? There were no positive male influences in the kid’s life. Bianca had always ascertained that she had no idea who Anna’s father was. Typical.
But the little girl was long gone now and Phil had inherited the teenager she’d become. He just hoped the child he remembered hadn’t been completely obliterated along the way.
****
Anna sat patiently on a chair in Mrs. Patterson’s bright yellow kitchen, waiting for her uncle to show up with Mrs. Alvarez, her assigned social worker. Mrs. Patterson bustled about the house, busily straightening up and occasionally pausing to direct a cheerful comment toward her charge. She really tried hard to make the situation seem normal, chattering on and on about how excited Anna must be to start a whole new life in a beautiful place like North Carolina. As if she hadn’t spent her entire life starting over every time her mother got a whim and decided to drag her off to another state.
Anna was polite but aloof. Truth be told, she felt nothing. Her emotions had been numbed, as if they were in some sort of stupor and found awakening to be too much of a bother. At the moment, it didn’t matter to her where she was going or what was happening. Life sucked. It had always sucked and nothing would ever change. She was weary of the whole thing.
She’d given the police Uncle Phil’s name as her only known relative, although she barely remembered him and didn’t even know where he lived anymore. Her mother rarely mentioned him. Once when she was drunk she did ramble on about that brother of mine, he thinks he’s so mush better ‘n me . . . Joe fuckin’ College . . . never wanted me to haf any fun. Shaid I sould settle down . . . can you belief that? Screw him!
Her own vague recollections of Uncle Phil were of a kind man who laughed a lot and bought toys for her and took her to the park sometimes. Mrs. Alvarez had assured her that he was simply delighted to have her come live with him, but Anna somehow found that hard to swallow. Who wanted to be saddled with someone else’s offspring, out of the blue? No one, that’s who! Mrs. Alvarez was full of it. She must think Anna was an idiot.
The crunch of tires on the driveway indicated that a car had pulled in, and Mrs. Patterson sashayed into the kitchen, chirping “They’re here, honey!” Anna nodded stiffly but didn’t move otherwise. She felt so tired. Why was she so tired? She’d slept fourteen hours last night. Sleeping was all she wanted to do lately.
Mrs. Patterson opened the kitchen’s back doo
r and the sound of voices rushed in, one of them a deeper baritone that sounded somehow familiar. In spite of herself, Anna peeked up at him. The man who stood there was well-dressed, handsome, and had a gentle, intelligent appearance. And amazingly, she recognized him right away. He was still her Uncle Phil, Mom’s younger brother, the man who had been her father figure when she was little. The man she had, once upon a time, requested as a daddy in her letter to Santa Claus. But that was so long ago . . .
2
Two days later, Philip and Anna were on their way home. He’d talked to both the FBI and the police regarding Bianca and promised to let them know if he had any word from her. Past experience proved chances of that were slim to nil. He’d spent hours talking to Mrs. Alvarez and signing document after document. He’d been to Anna’s school and picked up her transcript. It was a relief to discover that her grades, while not perfect by any means, were at least passable. He had her belongings, worn items stuffed into a couple of grocery bags, for crying out loud. And settled in the passenger seat next to him was Anna herself, quiet and timid and probably bewildered as hell.
When he’d first seen her sitting there at Mrs. Patterson’s kitchen table, his heart had ached. She’d looked downright pitiful. Her clothes were old and faded, and the tawny brown hair he remembered had grown so long that it was little more than a limp mess. She had looked up at him with wide, vacuous eyes, hopelessly resigned to her fate. Yet even through the frayed exterior, he could still see some of that sunny little girl residing inside her. She just needed an opportunity to blossom, and in this aspect, he knew exactly who could help.
They didn’t speak a lot at first. Philip tried not to overwhelm her with questions. She seemed content to stoically look out the car window at the scenery passing by. Somewhere in Georgia, he asked her if she was getting hungry, and she replied guardedly, “If you are.” A few exits down the interstate, he located a Cracker Barrel and stopped there for lunch. Anna seemed to perk up a bit, perusing the store with interest.
