Beyond the Darkness

by Angie Fenimore

  A series of tawdry women and sometimes their men continued to traipse through our lives. When Dad dated, Toni and I would be left with sitters or, not infrequently, be dragged along. With the confusion of neglect and drunken parties came the sexual abuse that haunted me for years to come. I hate even to remember, never mind describe, those encounters and the feelings they sparked in me—the terror, the sense of being too fragile to resist, the conspiracy of silence that kept me from seeking help, the belief that I had brought those painful attentions on myself, the guilt and shame and self-blame. I have since learned that such feelings are common among survivors of sexual abuse. But at the time I was so completely alone and afraid that I could turn my anger only on myself, shrouding my brittle sense of self with abject worthlessness.

  That was when the nightmares and eating disorders began. The food I ate was the only thing in life I could control. I remember one night when we went out to eat at Denny's—fast food was still our mainstay. Nothing sounded appealing, but I ordered anyway. I took a small bite of potatoes and felt compelled to clean off my fork, so I folded my napkin and pulled the fork between the folds. I took another bite and wiped my fork again. I felt that dirty, that contaminated.

  "What in the world are you doing?" Toni pried.

  "I just don't want to mix any of my food," I said.

  "But you're just eating potatoes," she replied.

  "Worry about your own food and leave me alone," I snapped, and then stomped off to the bathroom until Toni and Dad were through. These peculiar rituals gave way to periods of starving myself for days at a time.

  Daddy had no idea how to handle my distress and chose to overlook it, no doubt feeling guilty about the tangled mess our lives seemed to have become. Mama was barely a shadow in our lives. Having completed her treatment at Bear Creek, she had gotten a job and taken an apartment in Las Vegas with friends. She had changed her name and even had a nose job— symbols of the new woman she had become. She was too removed from us to get involved in my problems. By now I hardly referred to her as Mama even in my thoughts.

  Daddy had been offered a chance to transfer to Southern California, which he gladly accepted and Mama hadn't protested. We moved from Las Vegas three years to the day after we had arrived. Our new apartment in California was dark and drab, but I saw it as a chance for me to start over too. I even changed my name, introducing myself to the neighborhood kids as Roxanne and Toni as Lorena. Our new names lasted until we were enrolled in school and our birth certificates gave us away.

  Among our neighbors were two boys, Paul and Eric, who loved to annoy me and Toni. One sunny afternoon as I scribbled in the dirt, I saw the younger one, Eric, watching me through his screen door. Huge oak trees lined the sidewalk connecting the apartment houses, and I picked up a few acorns to toss at him. Undaunted, Eric smashed his nose against the screen, bellowing, "Roxanne, I want to kiss you!"

  I scowled back at him. "You monkey-face snot head, stay away from me!" I yelled, rising to my feet and fleeing down the walk to the pool.

  "I love you, Roxanna-banana," he squealed as he threw open the screen door and darted after me. Screaming, I ran around the block with Eric chasing behind. I made it to the parking lot and back up toward the walkway that separated our tiny yards where Eric's mother, Harriet, was standing out front, tapping her foot and drying her hands with a dish towel. I slid to a halt as Eric came tearing around the end of the apartment building.

  "Eric! You get in the house this instant, and you stop bothering Roxanne!" Harriet cried. She smacked him in the rear end as he trotted past her into the little apartment.

  Then she turned to me. She was the biggest woman I had ever seen, with broad shoulders and the thick physique of a linebacker. But her brown eyes were kindly when she smiled at me and said, "Is your dad still at work, honey?"

  "Yeah, for another hour," I replied.

  Harriet placed her hand on my shoulder and told me, "Go get your sister and come on over for some cookies."

  Harriet became a new pillar in our lives. I even tolerated her obnoxious son Eric in order to spend time with her. She brought casseroles over and played matchmaker for Dad. One friend she had in mind had just been through a divorce and was in the hospital having a hysterectomy. When the friend recovered, Harriet fixed them up.

  That is how we met JoAnne. So many of the women Dad was interested in didn't want to mother two little girls, and the ones who did seem to care about us didn't seem to appeal to him. But JoAnne met all of Dad's requirements. She was single, kept him happy in the bedroom and kept the house clean, had a five-year-old daughter of her own, and was willing to take on Toni and me in exchange for Dad's love. Not long after their first date, Dad and JoAnne were married.

  And not long after that, the strain and tension of trying to put two families together began to wear on us all.

  One afternoon, I was snooping through some things that JoAnne had piled in my closet when I discovered a manila folder. After peeking out into the hallway to be sure I was alone, I opened it. I was horrified by what I saw. Inside were pictures of JoAnne lying in a hospital bed, her eyes blackened and swollen shut. Lines of sutures held the pieces of her face together and a brace held her jaw in place. Along with the pictures were copies of insurance forms, accident reports and a newspaper article. I pored over the information: "Two vehicle accident . . . JoAnne Leigh, 20 . . . critical condition ... 8 months pregnant, lost the baby." I quickly stashed the file back where I found it.

  Some time later, JoAnne told me about her ordeal. Realizing that the baby had been killed in the crash, the doctors induced labor. It took all night, and then she started hemorrhaging. She could hear the doctors saying, "This one's not going to make it. She'll be gone in half an hour. We'd better go talk to the family." And she thought, "I can't die. I'm too young." At that moment she realized that she was floating above her body, able to see herself on the bed, the doctors frantically working, her family crying in the hallway. She was surrounded by bright light from which two beings emerged who seemed familiar, though she wasn't sure who they were. "It's not your time," they told her. "But I don't want to go back," she pleaded. They insisted, "You have to go back. The Lord still has a purpose for you on earth." And so, she told me, she took the difficult course of returning to life to complete whatever her special duty was.

  I didn't know what to think about her story, but I knew the part about having a difficult life was true. JoAnne had told me of her tortured childhood, and I knew she suffered from migraines. It wasn't until later that we learned of her bouts of clinical depression, her suicide attempts, and the violent outbursts that led to stays in the mental ward of the hospital. In fact, that's where she was when Harriet told us she was recovering from a hysterectomy.

  JoAnne provided me with structure and the chance to be a little girl again, two things I desperately needed and deeply resented, and so I became the target of her wrath. Something as trivial as my forgetting to fold a load of clothes would provoke a hateful blast of accusations. JoAnne seemed convinced that everything I did wrong was meant to inconvenience her, and she would strike out, shouting that I was stupid or, worse, "just like your mother."

  But her reactions were completely unpredictable. When I was on a field trip in sixth grade, I got in trouble on the school bus for throwing papers at a boy who was teasing me. As I walked home from school that afternoon, my stomach ached in anticipation of a tirade from JoAnne. I had never gotten in trouble at school before, and I was sure that JoAnne wouldn't believe that I had been defending myself. All the way home I kept trying to remember if there was anything else I'd done wrong, like forgetting to turn off the curling iron or leaving my empty cereal bowl in the sink—anything that would put her in a bad mood and make my situation worse.

  When I came through the front door, I could hear her banging dishes and slamming the cupboards in the kitchen. I was in for it. Steadying myself, I went into the kitchen and laid my teacher's note on the counter, right next to JoAnne'
s collection of Demerol and Valium.

  "What's this?" she snarled at me, picking up the note.

  "I got in trouble on the bus for throwing paper at Nathan after he said I had chicken legs," I sheepishly replied.

  "Did you start it?" JoAnne barked.

  "No," I said.

  "That idiot principal. I'll fix his wagon," she said.

  I just stood there in disbelief. The next day JoAnne went to the principal and fought my case for me. I was grateful for her support, but I knew better than to count on it. JoAnne's mood swings kept me constantly off balance.

  She was also kind during my second encounter with death. The call came one evening when we had just finished dinner, and Daddy answered the phone. Almost immediately he dropped it, sobbing into his hands. JoAnne picked up the phone, and I heard her say, "Okay, we're on our way."

  My uncle Sam had been in a car accident on the highway between Las Vegas and California. He was heading home from a business trip and had been drinking when he crossed over the center divider and hit a semi head-on. Daddy was beside himself, but JoAnne sprang into action. Stabilizing volatile situations was her greatest gift; it was the small crises that she couldn't seem to weather. She called a neighbor to baby-sit for us, then grabbed her purse and she and Dad were gone.

  Toni was crying hysterically, and so I held her and tried to reassure her. "Uncle Sam will be fine, Toni. JoAnne got into that really bad accident and she's fine," I said.

  Toni pushed me away in surprise. "You dummy," she said. "Uncle Sam's dead!"

  Uncle Sam's funeral was the first I was allowed to attend. I had never seen someone who was dead, and I was both curious and scared, thinking of the moment when we would walk by the casket. Toni and I walked up the aisle with Uncle Sam's daughter, Melanie, the youngest of his four children. When we reached the casket, she bent down and kissed her father, fastening a little pin, a pair of praying hands, on his lapel.

  Uncle Sam's black hair shimmered, and the thick makeup on his face looked artificial. He looked just like a mannequin, I thought, with no trace of human energy or personality. It was clear to me that he was no longer in his body, that his soul had passed from him. At that moment I knew that there must be life after death.

  As time went on, JoAnne's hatred of me grew. I remember one Saturday afternoon when Toni and I asked if we could take the bus to the beach. JoAnne said no, that we had too much work to do, and it was nearly four o'clock by the time we finished the chores she assigned us. So we decided to make the best of things and lie in the yard to get some sun. By then our tiny back yard was completely shadowed by the apartment house, so we set up our lawn chairs in the front yard. Spying us through the upstairs bedroom window, JoAnne flew into a rage, tearing down the stairs and throwing open the front door. "You little whore!" she screamed at me, with murder in her eyes. "I know what you're trying to do." Mortified, I didn't dare ask her what she meant for fear she would tell me and all the rest of the neighbors. I felt that she took pride in belittling and humiliating me in public. Most of the time I didn't even know what I had done to provoke her vile anger.

  I did my best to stay out of JoAnne's way, to clean the house and cook, but inevitably I would do something, and her rage would erupt all over again.

  One afternoon, I came home from school to find JoAnne lying on the couch with her heavy, drugged arm draped across her face. The curtains were pulled tight, so I knew that she must have a migraine. "Shut that damned door," she bawled. As usual, her shouting made my stomach burn and my lungs clutch with fear. If I slipped quietly through the room, she would think that I didn't care that she was in pain, but if I asked how she was, I would invite a new barrage of insults. Either way, I might provoke her to another suicide attempt. Gently pushing the door closed, struggling with my options, I caught a glimpse of papers scattered across the kitchen floor. I tiptoed across the carpet to investigate. There on the floor lay all of our family photos, some tattered and torn, some burned. In each photo, my image had been obliterated.

  Terrified, I disappeared into my room until Dad came home. I could hear them arguing back and forth.

  "Good grief, JoAnne. What in the world possessed you . . ." Daddy's low voice faded in and out.

  "Wouldn't you rather I destroy her pictures than kill the little brat?" came JoAnne's response.

  I never really knew what particular crime of mine had brought about that storm. Now I suspect that JoAnne's rages were fired as much by her problems with Daddy and his drinking as by anything we girls did. But at the time it seemed to us that anything could set her off.

  Invariably, these outbursts would spur JoAnne to extravagant expressions of remorse, never made directly but jotted in little notes that she'd leave us in our rooms. Then I'd feel constrained to forgive her, no matter how much hurt and resentment I was still feeling over her bruising words and actions. During the worst blowups I would sometimes take a bottle of JoAnne's drugs and lock myself in the garage, though I could never bring myself to actually take any pills. Then I'd berate myself for getting cold feet. Not only did I live in constant fear and humiliation, but I was also a coward.

  That summer my Dad's kids from his first marriage came to visit for a week. JoAnne tolerated them, all the while jibing at Dad about all his kids and ex-wives, but I could tell that the pressure was really getting to her. By the end of their visit, she had given him an ultimatum. "It's Angie or me," she demanded. "You choose."

  Unwilling to learn his choice, I gave Dad an out by asking my half-sister, Gloria, if I could come to Indiana with her family. She agreed and we made the drive back, stopping at the Grand Canyon along the way. But the ride was anything but a pleasure trip. Not only was I teased mercilessly by Gloria's two young sons, but her mother, my dad's first wife, was traveling with us. I was profoundly relieved when we pulled into Indianapolis one week later, just as the sun was coming up over the horizon. Feeling awkward about staying at Gloria's, I just rested on her couch until it was a decent hour to wake Grandma and Grandpa Carver, who lived just up the street. That afternoon, my cousins—the four daughters of my mom's twin sister— came over to welcome me, and we excitedly cooked up plans for me to move in with them.

  My aunt was divorced and worked nights as a cocktail waitress, so we girls came and went as we pleased. JoAnne had kept me on tenterhooks, desperately afraid of doing something wrong, but now I had no supervision whatever and I was overwhelmed by my new freedom. One wild night I was introduced to cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs all in one fell swoop.

  I spent that summer bouncing between my various relatives' houses and, toward the end, went out to see Dad's family farm. My grandmother was in a rest home, and so the house had been unoccupied for years. Tall weeds and grass smothered the little cracked steps where I had trotted along with Carrie and Chris. The paint of the little house was cracked and peeling, and the screen door balanced on one hinge. Behind the house stood a lone cement wall, tarnished with black soot, starkly out of place amid the tall grass and ringed by pieces of splintered wood. It was all that remained of the old red barn that had been so alive in my imagination. Staring at the ruins, I silently wished that I would just disappear like Carrie, Uncle Sam, and the barn. I just couldn't go back to life with JoAnne.

  But I had to return. I was home only a day before the tension threatened to engulf us all. So I was packed off to stay with my cousin Melanie for a week until I could move in with her oldest brother Taylor and his wife, who lived nearby. There I enrolled in school and again got swept up by the dizzying freedom that was the flip side of JoAnne's stifling supervision. My cousin let me drink and smoke—they even bought me cigarettes—and allowed me to smoke marijuana, though only at home. It wasn't long before I was skipping school and doing hard drugs with my new friends.

  Just before Christmas break I skipped out one morning with a friend who had procured some PCP that we did together. When we went back to school that afternoon, I stopped in the bathroom, where I stood in front of the mirror f
or an hour talking to a "new student"—my own reflection. When the bell rang, I couldn't find the bathroom door, and when I did, it wouldn't open. Panicking, I decided that the school day had ended and that the janitor had locked me in, and I started to scream until another student rescued me. She showed me that I had been pushing on the door, when what I needed to do was pull!

  The next morning Taylor told me that I had been expelled from school and that my dad was coming to get me. Now all the emotions I had been crowding out with drugs and alcohol surged up in me. I missed my dad and Toni so much that I wanted desperately to go home. I even missed the order that JoAnne imposed on my life, as much as I dreaded her rages. But I was sure that she would never have me back.

  When Daddy arrived, I confessed about the drinking and the drugs—everything that I had gotten mixed up in. Then I started to cry. "Oh Daddy, now where will I live?"

  He hugged me tight and called me his little sweetheart. He wasn't angry—he even told me how sorry he was that things had gotten so bad for me. And he delivered the words I most longed to hear: "I'm taking you home," he said.

  FIVE

  I don't know how Dad worked things out with JoAnne, but when I got home, she made a real attempt to treat me with respect. It seemed that all of us had made a new commitment to be a family, and so that Christmas and the first few months of the new year were more peaceful than at any time in our life together. JoAnne had started going to church again, taking Toni and her daughter, Cindy, with her. I joined them, just to be conciliatory at first, but I grew to love my church like a second home. Its members were so genuine, so lifeloving, and they showed me such kindness and acceptance. Through them, I was nourished by a newfound faith in God. It was during this time that JoAnne told me that she'd learned what it was she had been sent back to life to do. Her mission was to bring me to God. I knew that she was right. And so it came as a devastating blow when Jo Anne broke down again. It happened on a beautiful spring Sunday. JoAnne had missed church for a few weeks, and Toni and I would attend with another family. We were sitting on a pew near the front of the chapel when a man came down the aisle and handed me a note. It read, Your father called. You need to go home immediately.