Even when she was at her most extreme, watching Megan could be exhilarating. “Megan was what I called honestly stupid,” said an old friend, Lashonda Gregory. “I say that in the most loving way, because it was the best thing I loved about her. She was so carefree. It wasn’t that she sought out dangerous stuff. It was more like she was an adventure seeker.” In summertime, Megan and her friends would swim at a hotel pool behind McDonald’s, not far from their house. Megan would do everything the other kids wished they had the nerve to do—dives, cannonballs, flips—then jump out of the water and dare the others to do it, too, until she was running laps around the edge of the pool, imploring the others: “Come on! Just run around with me!” Once, Megan’s bathing suit strap kept sliding, and a man sitting on the edge of the pool made a crack about it: “She might as well be naked!” Megan looked at the man and took off her suit, then jumped in the pool, completely naked. She was twelve.
The vulnerable side of Megan was hard to notice. Jo Moser believed that Megan’s bravado was a façade, but she saw how the girl could seem threatening. The cousins and friends who spent the most time with Megan all knew what she was capable of. What provoked her the most was hearing the word no. The refrain of Megan’s teenage years was pretty consistent: “I don’t care, I’m going anyway” or “You can’t make me” or “I’m going to go back to school and beat the shit out of so-and-so.” By the time she reached her teens, many people believed Muriel was simply too frightened to rein her in. Everyone heard the threats: “I’ll kill you in your sleep! I’ll stab you to death!”
“I honestly think they were scared of her,” her cousin Jessica Small said. “If she wanted something, she’d be like, ‘I want this,’ and they’d hand it right to her.” Muriel would hear Megan pitching a fit and try to put her foot put down, but Megan would get really mad and throw something at her, and then Muriel would say, “Megan, I don’t have the money, but take my last five dollars!” What appalled her aunts and cousins the most was how Megan was rewarded for bad behavior. No matter what, she always got an allowance. Megan’s aunt Ella remembers asking Muriel, “Why do you pay her to be bad?”
It wasn’t hard to draw a line from Megan’s recklessness to the pain she might have felt about Lorraine. Moser didn’t think so at first—she thought Muriel was well ensconced in the mother role, and Megan almost never brought up Lorraine when they talked. But after close to ten years, Moser reconsidered. What struck her was how little the girl had changed. Megan was an unfulfilled child, still angry, still wounded, still feeling like she wasn’t getting what she deserved in life. She grew up to become a romantic, looking for love—somebody who accepted her with all her flaws—and her grandparents weren’t enough. Indulging her only made her more insecure, more needy. “In some ways, she had both inferiority and grandiosity going at the same time,” Moser said. “Those were the two elements: I can do anything I want, and I’m a piece of shit.”
Scarborough, Maine, is about two square miles, with a population of just under twenty thousand people. Along the ocean, east of Route 1, are the million-dollar homes in spots like Prouts Neck, where the Bushes and Oprah and Billy Joel and Paul Newman have spent their summers. To the west is farmland that, over the last few decades, has been developed into lots of McMansions. That’s the allure of Scarborough: The newly rich can build their dream homes in the woods and still be nestled right in between everything they would ever want, a half-hour drive from Portland, the ocean, and Sebago Lake.
At about the time Megan was finishing junior high school, Muriel and Doug moved the family from downtown Portland to Scarborough. Greg didn’t make the move; he went on to a series of group homes and relatives before living on his own. Muriel and Doug had a trailer on the western border of town, as far from the ocean as you can get without leaving Scarborough—a single-wide mobile home, fourteen by seventy feet, with three bedrooms, an open kitchen, a small living room, putty-gray siding, and a little brown deck with room for a couple of chairs. The Crystal Springs trailer park housed only ten trailers on this road, and woods surrounded them on all sides.
Scarborough is a commuter town, a bedroom community. But for Megan, compared to Avon Place, it was the middle of nowhere. She thought most of the people in Scarborough were snobs, and most people in the Crystal Springs trailer park shared that opinion. Almost the second she walked into Scarborough Middle School, Megan was marked as white trash. She started in regular classrooms but soon was sent to special ed. When she started Scarborough High the following year, she was placed in the alternative part of the school for troubled kids, a place the students called the Basement. It was an open campus for troubled kids; Megan could come and go as she wanted. But she had her share of envy: She saw other kids walking around Scarborough High in designer sneakers and backpacks that weren’t in her family’s price range.
The police in Scarborough know all about Crystal Springs. They get domestic calls there a lot, as well as some drug cases: dealers, people with outstanding warrants, people trying to blend in, to fade away. On various occasions, they caught Megan in town, shoplifting from Walmart—cosmetics, usually—and she ended up in the Youth Center, a jail for young offenders. Though the kids were rowdy there, it wasn’t designed to feel like a grown-up jail; more like a group home where you happened to be locked up. Greg called it Kiddie Camp. When Megan was sent there, Muriel’s first reaction was relief, and then leniency kicked in; she went from “Yes, Megan should be there” to “Well, maybe she deserves another chance.”
Her arresting officer, much of the time, was Doug Weed, a married father of five who had grown up in Scarborough. He first met the girl when she was fourteen, in October 2002, when he got two calls from a girl accusing Megan of stalking her. The two had been feuding, as he remembered it, and the matter fizzled in time. But he would see Megan again. For a few years, you couldn’t be on the Scarborough police force without running into Megan. There was the neighbor she tangled with in 2004 who asked for a restraining order. Then there was the time in June 2005 when she got caught carrying drug paraphernalia, most likely a marijuana pipe, which forced her into juvenile rehab. There was the time, the following November, when she dashed out of the rehab and back to Muriel’s place. Muriel called the police to come collect her.
Weed was conservative politically, and before he had kids, he had a tendency to write off as drains on society some of the people in town whom he was supposed to be serving and protecting—to just say, You’re a waste, you’re a piece of shit, I don’t care. After becoming a father, he noticed how a lot of his childless colleagues couldn’t stand teenagers. If they saw a group of them hanging out, they’d walk the other way. Officers like Weed were more likely to give the kids a mulligan, thinking, Okay, you’re sixteen years old. You’re an idiot. Sometimes, as he did with Megan, Weed went a little further. He saw they didn’t have what his kids had. They didn’t have a father there to keep them in line—to tell them what to do, to help them when they had those questions all kids have. Weed decided that it depended. If kids were receptive to what he was trying to do and how he was trying to help, then he would go out of his way ten thousand times to do anything he could. If kids weren’t receptive—if they weren’t willing to help themselves—then he wouldn’t bother.
Weed found he was one of the few cops who could actually talk to Megan, because he’d given her breaks now and then. He would catch her with cigarettes: “Megan, come on, seriously, you’re sixteen years old. You know you can’t do that. Put them away. Let’s go home.” Or he’d find her out late at night: “Let’s go back to Muriel’s house, Megan.” He’d drop her off himself. He gained her trust. And he liked her. He noticed she was angry a lot. Weed wasn’t sure where that anger came from. He didn’t know who her mother and father were. But when he met Muriel and saw a sixty-year-old woman struggling to control a fifteen-year-old girl, that was all he needed to know.
When Megan was seventeen, she stopped going to school. She continued to live at home with Murie
l and work odd jobs. She was picked up more often, usually for shoplifting or alcohol; once, her cousin Desiree said, she blew a 1.25. She and her friend Lashonda Gregory got arrested when they picked up a credit card a customer left behind at Mr. Bagel, where Megan worked briefly, and went shopping for Lashonda’s baby shower.
Despite everything, Officer Weed decided to be optimistic about Megan. He saw someone who didn’t have the support that he’d had as a child, and he felt he could help her. At the very least, letting Megan know she could come to him with any problem would be better than doing what everyone else seemed to do—write a summons and then kick a kid loose. Why not take a chance on people? Otherwise, he figured, he was just a robot who locked people up. She had his phone number and called all the time, leaving long voice mails. He heard from her when she needed to vent, even to say her grandmother was in the hospital. The fact that she reached out led him to believe that Megan knew she needed stability, someone to rely on other than Muriel, someone to whom she felt comfortable talking. Even if his return calls were five minutes—“I got your message, tell your grandmother I’m thinking of her. You doing good? You staying out of trouble?”—Weed felt the conversations calmed Megan down, made her feel a little more secure.
She never brought up boyfriends with him, and he never asked. But Megan did tell him when she found out she was pregnant. The father was a DJ, about thirty-two, with one child already in New Hampshire. Megan met him at a club in Portland—a bathroom hookup, nothing more. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said softly.
Officer Weed told her it was a blessing. He had five children of his own. Children, he told Megan, helped you understand why you were here—and help you start living for someone other than yourself.
With Muriel’s consent, a judge in the youth court that had sent Megan to rehab ordered Megan to stay in St. Andre’s, a home for unwed mothers, for the length of her pregnancy. Megan spent her time there in a panic, watching the state take away other new mothers’ babies as soon as they delivered. When Muriel tried to convince Megan that they wouldn’t take her baby—that every mother’s situation was different—Megan was too angry with Muriel to listen. The staff couldn’t convince her, either. Megan couldn’t get away from the sense that history was repeating itself. She thought about how her own mother had lost her and what it had done to her. She couldn’t let that happen to her child.
When Lorraine heard that Megan was expecting a baby, she tried harder than usual to stay in touch. Since losing custody of Megan and Greg, Lorraine had drifted in and out of the family’s orbit, sometimes falling out of contact for years at a time. She quit drinking for almost a year, then married, then divorced, then started drinking again. When she had three more children—Allie a year after Megan, and twins named Bethany and Stephanie a few years after that—the state took them away from her, too, arguing that her living conditions weren’t acceptable. Lorraine had relinquished those children rather than allow the state to move them all into a state-run family shelter—something she vowed never to do to her kids. That never ceased to appall Megan. “She couldn’t even take care of us,” Megan would say. “How come she had more kids?”
Her rift with Muriel had long since separated Megan from the rest of her family. But this would be Lorraine’s first grandchild—and for the first time, Megan was living away from Muriel, receptive to Lorraine in a way she’d never been. When her due date approached, Megan contacted her caseworker and asked if she could leave St. Andre’s and stay with Lorraine. Lorraine jumped at the chance to take in Megan when Muriel would not.
For two weeks, Megan was able to experience her mother for the first time without Muriel filtering everything she saw. Lorraine was sober now, in her late thirties, with dark circles under her eyes that revealed her years of hard living. After a few years in Florida, she had moved back to West Portland. She was working at a Domino’s managed by her boyfriend, Bill, whom she credited with keeping her from falling off the wagon. Lorraine seized the chance to tell her daughter everything she’d wanted her to know. She railed against Muriel and the injustice she believed had been done to her—to them both, really, and to Greg, she said. She talked about how horrible a mother Muriel had been to her when she was younger, and how Lorraine and Megan had been separated for no good reason. Megan’s eyes widened as she listened. She seemed to sympathize. Lorraine held out hope that she did. Of course, Megan had a lifetime of longing to remind her who had stayed with her all those years and who hadn’t. Two weeks wasn’t nearly enough to persuade Megan that she had been brought up by the wrong person.
Megan delivered a healthy baby girl in the summer of 2006. She named her Liliana. By then she had left Lorraine’s; now she returned to Scarborough, taking the baby with her. Her choice stung Lorraine. In time, she would decide that Megan couldn’t handle the truth—that she had been poisoned against her mother. Still, a door had been opened; she and Megan would stay in touch, even if they felt like strangers. And something about meeting her mother and having the baby seemed to chasten Megan a little. When she finally came home to Crystal Springs, she seemed determined to do things differently. Megan could tell herself she had it all now—she’d never be lonely again—and that as long as she lived, nothing would come between her and Lili.
Motherhood became Megan. In the beginning, she was never anything other than ecstatic about the baby and gentle toward her. The same people who’d been cowed and intimidated by her were in awe of how happy she seemed with her daughter, how peaceful and free of anger. Gone were the histrionics, the temper, the volatility. “Megan loved her daughter,” Greg said. “Liliana was everything to her.”
But Megan began to feel some new pressures. The four hundred dollars a month she received from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services wasn’t enough to feed and clothe her and Lili, at least not the way Megan would have liked. The girl who once demanded the best of everything, who shoplifted makeup to compete with the rich kids of Scarborough, was looking at a life very much like her mother’s and Nana’s, living on government checks. Megan felt a need to deliver for her daughter and secure her future while also securing something more for herself—a life apart from the baby, one that promised success. No matter how much she loved Lili, that love did nothing to cure her of the elemental loneliness she’d always had.
AMBER
Kim and Amber were both tiny and skinny, with the same long nose that had a little bulb on the tip. The Overstreet sisters were born six years apart in Pennsylvania—Kim in 1977, Amber in 1983. Kim may have been the firstborn, but Amber was Margie’s baby: Everything about her was cute; anything she wanted, she’d get. Even Kim, who resented her sometimes, used to tell her that her legs looked like meaty drumsticks. When Amber grew up, she weighed a hundred pounds soakin’ wet, as her family put it, and stood four-eleven. Their dad, Al, liked to rib her that she was a half inch short of qualifying for disability payments as a little person. “Why don’t you take your shoes off ?” he told her. “You’d get a check every month for the rest of your life.”
Al had grown up in Wilmington, North Carolina, where his father had been a farmer. Bakery work sustained Al for years. He made rolls for Oroweat, and for the Federal Bake Shop, and then for Donut Town in Bristol, Pennsylvania, fifteen minutes outside of Philadelphia. That’s where he met Margaret Ann Sassy. She was a waitress at a seafood restaurant, four years younger than Al, and attractive, with dark hair, like Amber’s would be. Margie had a much more comfortable childhood than Al. Their daughters, looking at photos years later, would decide their mother’s side was just plain rich, and she’d gone and run off with a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. To Amber and Kim, at least, it was a grand love story.
Shortly after Amber was born, the family moved from Pennsylvania back to North Carolina. Al reconnected with his father for the first time in years, and Kim remembers family dinners with a bunch of cousins she never knew she had. At first they lived several hours away from Wilmington in Gastoni
a, then a tough working-class town next to Charlotte, where Al had found work in the knitting mills nearby in Dolford.
Gastonia was where the first tragedy of Amber’s life took place. She was five years old. Through all that came afterward, Al and Margie stayed close to their daughters. If all four of them ended up suffering from the same affliction—addiction was, it seemed, the Overstreet family business—they each did so privately. Call it pride or denial, but to them, it was how they expressed their love.
The tragedy happened at home. Amber’s family was renting the garage apartment of another family’s house. According to Kim and Al, a twenty-six-year-old neighbor named James would take Kim and Amber and another girl to play tennis at the local park. Amber would retell the story in different ways to different friends over the years, but a few of the same details always came up: that James grabbed Amber and took her to the bushes . . . that Margie caught James and Amber in bed together nude . . . that Margie couldn’t pull him out of bed, since he weighed too much . . . that Margie called the police.
What came next was mixed up in everyone’s memory. Kim always thought that James went to jail and Al went to jail for shooting him. But Al said he bought a shotgun and threatened to blow James’s brains out and the police intervened before he could. No formal charges were filed. No arrest record for the incident appears to exist today, suggesting that everyone decided to walk away.
The Overstreets moved immediately. The entire family fell to pieces. Kim said that Amber went on to blame her mother, and Margie blamed herself, too. Margie was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown, and when she got out, she remained separated from Al, moving with Amber to Charlotte and later Wilmington, bunking in an aunt’s house. Kim stayed with Al, except when he served a jail sentence after racking up too many DUIs; then she stayed for a short while with a friend’s family. The rape scarred Amber physically as well as emotionally. Several friends and family members said that she told them she couldn’t have children because of what James had done to her. But the years eventually papered over what happened, and when Amber was in junior high school, they all settled together—first in Wilmington, then in Florida, then back in Wilmington.
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