by Dianne Dixon
“If you’re asking me as your friend,” Ari said, “the answer is ‘As tense as hell.’ If you’re asking me as your psychiatrist, the answer is ‘Relieved.’ You’ve blown away a lot of cobwebs. True, you’ve found out some disturbing things, but you’ve also turned up some comforting ones.”
Justin gave a sardonic laugh. “ ‘Comforting’? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You found out that, in spite of having information on a gravestone to the contrary, you haven’t been dead for the last thirty years. And you found out that you’re not crazy. Considering the alternatives, I’d call that comforting.”
“Yeah. Well, right now I’m not feeling anything even close to comfortable.” Justin wasn’t in the mood to be mollified.
“I want you to be clear on where we are here,” Ari said. “What happened was that you were faced with a series of overwhelmingly negative events at a very young age, and you needed a way to process that.”
Justin was impatient to get to the reason for his visit. He cut Ari off. “I know the rap,” he said. “You’ve explained it to me. I get it. Dissociative identity disorder, which means at some point I sealed off TJ from Justin and kept them in two different places in my head.” The statement mortified him; it made him sound pathetic and broken.
He began to pace the room. “I don’t care how much you tell me that what I did was a form of self-preservation. It still feels like a made-for-TV freak show. What I did was find a way to lie to myself on such a monumental level that I was able to block out—what, ten, twelve years of my childhood? I just erased being adopted and living in foster homes, painted over it with my imaginary life on Lima Street. Call it survival all you want. But from in here, it feels like I’m a friggin’ maniac.”
Ari’s tone was calmly professional. “You were barely a toddler when you were thrown into a psychological hell. By your fifth birthday, you’d already been ripped away from two different mothers. And after that, you were in an astoundingly bad foster-care situation. That’s a history of extreme psychological abuse. And, yes, at the point when you left Middletown and went to college, for some reason, in order to deal with whatever was going on, you detached TJ from Justin. You were a kid in a world of absolute chaos. You came up with a way to survive. You should be proud of how well you coped.”
Justin’s voice had a bitter edge to it. “Finding out that I’ve been ‘psychiatrically challenged’ for most of my life makes me feel a lot of things, but proud isn’t one of them.”
“That’s too bad,” Ari said. “Because the truth is, given the same kind of beginning that you had—no opportunity to form even one secure emotional bond in early childhood, no chance to establish any trust with the people who were supposed to be taking care of you—most of us wouldn’t have turned out half as healthy as you did.”
“Being thirty-three years old and thinking I was someone I wasn’t,” Justin said, “that’s your idea of healthy?”
“Actually you were that person, there was just more to the story,” Ari said. “But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to explain is that given your history, it would be expected for you to be seriously dysfunctional. At best a dropout or a felon.”
“But I turned out to be a lying fruitcake instead.” Justin shot Ari an exasperated glance.
“Look, it’s very common for kids who are under no psychological strain at all to think they remember things they couldn’t possibly remember, things that may have happened before they were born. But they believe they remember because they’ve heard the stories a million times from their parents and grandparents. The only difference is, you told the story to yourself. That little song had everything in it that you needed for the building of an emotional fortress.”
“Ari,” Justin said, “do you want to know what the fortress looked like from in here?” He tapped his forehead. “Like rotting, black … Swiss cheese.”
“I’m going to need you to explain that one to me,” Ari said.
“Imagine watching a movie through a sheet of tar paper with holes punched in it. That’s how it was for me. I could only see pieces of the picture,” Justin said. “In college, when I tried to think about my life, to remember specifics … I couldn’t do it. It was totally weird. I knew I’d been a kid. I could remember what my room looked like, but the only house I could get a picture of in my mind was the one on Lima Street. And I knew I had gone to school … but I could only remember general things … like that the name of my high school was Wilson, but I didn’t remember the teachers’ names or what the kids in my class looked like. I couldn’t even remember what I looked like.” Justin stopped and gave a wry laugh. “Want to know something? I’ve never seen a photograph of myself as a kid. Only as a toddler, and then in college. Nothing in between.” There was wistfulness as he added: “I have absolutely no idea what I looked like while I was growing up.”
Ari leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. He was studying Justin intently as he said, “All those years, between college and when you came back here from London … you had absolutely no memory of having lived in either of the foster homes you were in?”
“It was crazy,” Justin replied. “I could feel that there were these dark places in my head, stuff I couldn’t get at, and it scared the shit out of me. But all I knew for sure was the Justin Fisher from Lima Street thing. The rest of it was a jumble.”
“You did four years of college and you were in London for ten years afterward,” Ari said. “That’s a long time to live with something like that. Why didn’t you ever try to figure it out? Why didn’t you try to contact your family? Or talk to a shrink about it?”
Justin went to the window and gazed out. He waited for a while and then said, “The truth is, I knew there was part of me that was seriously fucked-up.”
“So why didn’t you do anything about it?”
“Because it was way too scary. Every time I tried to figure out what was hiding in those blank spaces in my memory, I’d get hit with this horrible feeing that if I didn’t back away from it, I was going to die.”
“What about friends and people you worked with—what did you tell them?” Ari asked.
“Not much,” Justin said. Then he smiled. “Most people are a lot more interested in their own lives than anybody else’s.” As he glanced at Ari, his tone was full of irony. “Everybody thought I was the soul of empathy and charm. You know why? Because in being scared shitless of ever having to talk about me and my story, I learned to make it all about the other guy.”
Justin let out an exhausted sigh. “And then I came home, and the Justin Fisher Who Never Was went to Lima Street. And the crazy came spilling out.”
Ari fixed his gaze on Justin. “You used Justin Fisher from Lima Street to save yourself,” he said. “There was nothing crazy about that. TJ’s life was too hard. If you couldn’t have gotten away from it, it would’ve killed you.”
When Justin heard the word killed, he flinched.
His heart was beating with the force of a sledgehammer as he said: “Ari, there’s something I need to tell you. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it is, it’s big. Bigger than any of the other stuff we’ve found out about TJ …”
There was a long silence before Justin finished his thought. “It’s bigger. And it’s much worse.”
T J
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT, JUNE 1990
*
It was after midnight. The sidewalks on Main Street were empty. She was making a left turn—not far from the Greyhound bus station—coming home from her cousin’s bachelorette party. That was when she saw him running across the street with a duffel bag in his hand.
The minute she saw him, she knew him. Over the years, from time to time, she’d stood at the edges of the playgrounds at his elementary school and his middle school, and she had watched him. And she’d wanted to call to him and say that she loved him. But she felt her declarations of love would have been valueless because, when he’d needed her most, she had failed him.
<
br /> He was almost eighteen, tall and muscular now, but there was something about the way he moved that was unmistakably TJ. He was alone on the street, passing within inches of her. She was exhilarated and excited from the party, and before she realized she’d done it, she had called out to him and said: “TJ! It’s Kati.”
His stride faltered and he slowed. For a fraction of an instant, their eyes met. “It’s me. Kati, your old baby-sitter,” she said. “How are you?”
There was a flicker of hesitation, as if he was on the verge of stopping and saying something to her. But he turned and sprinted away, quickly crossing the street and disappearing around a corner.
Kati’s initial instinct was to follow him, but the moment had passed and the things she had wanted to say suddenly seemed pitifully insufficient.
As she drove away, she thought about the last time they had been together—the terrible night in which she’d failed him, and lost him, by not finding a way to keep him safe.
After Margaret had left the house to go back to Middletown and retrieve TJ’s roller skates, the sound of the wind and the rain, growing progressively stronger, kept Kati on edge. She was worried that the storm’s increasing noise would wake TJ. She knew if he woke up and discovered his mother was not in the house, he would be terrified.
At some point, Kati began calling Margaret’s office at Wesleyan, hoping against hope that she would suddenly be there, safe and well—with the explanation that she’d had car trouble, or gone for a snack, or fallen asleep at her desk. And then, when Margaret’s phone continued to go unanswered, Kati stopped calling and began circling through the house, terrified, frantic to see a break in the storm, to hear the sound of a key in the lock, to understand what it was that should be done now that she and TJ had been set adrift, in this empty house, on this furious night.
Just before one in the morning, the doorbell rang. The abrupt ring of the chime, echoing in the stillness of the living room, sounded thunderously loud. But it was Kati’s scream that had awakened TJ. It had happened when Kati saw the state trooper standing in the doorway, his rain-soaked hat in his hand. The look on his face told her Margaret was dead.
Upstairs, TJ, still half-asleep, had shouted: “Mommy!” And the night split apart. Everything changed. And by the time morning had come, TJ was gone.
The trooper had placed a series of phone calls as soon as he’d discovered there was a young child in the house who was now motherless and, in the purest sense, an orphan. The house had quickly filled with people—additional troopers, neighbors, and local police. Within hours, arrangements were being made to put TJ into foster care.
Kati pleaded with the troopers. “Please,” she said. “Couldn’t you just let him stay with me until, until …” But even as she was saying it, she knew she had no way to take care of TJ. Her parents had recently moved to Florida, she lived in a tiny apartment with three other girls, and every cent she had was in her purse—less than fifty dollars.
In the midst of the confusion, a social worker had arrived. She was young and pretty, and TJ’s was the last case she was ever going to handle; in a week, she was getting married and moving away. She was scattered and distracted, descending on Kati like a whirlwind: wanting Kati to make TJ stop crying, wanting Kati to admire her engagement ring, wanting Kati to show her where the phone was so she could call her fiancé, and wanting Kati to quickly pack for TJ—whatever Kati could fit into a single suitcase.
The final thing the social worker wanted was for Kati to give her access to Margaret’s files; she needed to locate TJ’s birth certificate.
Kati, numbed by the shock of Margaret’s death and the sadness of TJ’s plight, stuffed TJ’s clothes into an old blue suitcase and handed over a large envelope that had been at the bottom of one of Margaret’s desk drawers.
Across the front of the envelope, in Margaret’s elegant handwriting, was the inscription “For TJ.” Inside the envelope were two items: a birth certificate (folded into a small square, no bigger than a credit card) and a spiral notebook full of snapshots. Neither Kati nor the social worker examined them closely. The social worker was in a hurry to be on her way. Kati was in a daze of grief.
The last Kati saw of TJ was as the social worker was carrying him away from the house. He was holding his hand out to Kati in a frantic, anxious gesture—as if he were groping for a miracle. And he was asking the question—“Mommy?”—over and over and over again.
Kati closed the door of Margaret’s house, leaned against it, and looked around the living room. It was then that she saw TJ’s piano.
In the driveway outside, the social worker had buckled TJ into the backseat of her sedan. She had opened the envelope and removed the contents—the birth certificate and the spiral notebook. The birth certificate was not the updated document issued when TJ’s adoption had been finalized; it was the one that had come to Margaret tucked inside the notebook. It identified TJ as Thomas Justin Fisher, a boy who lived on Lima Street.
The certificate was put into a file folder—a folder that would, from this point forward, hold the official documentation of TJ’s life and identity.
As the social worker was in the process of tossing the spiral notebook into TJ’s blue suitcase, she looked up and saw that Kati was at the rear door of the car, sliding a child-size grand piano onto the backseat.
The social worker was about to tell her to stop, to take the piano away. But she was looking into Kati’s eyes. The determination that was there was forbidding her to utter a single word.
*
TJ’s new home was a ramshackle dwelling in Middletown, its paint faded to the colors of ash and rusted things, the colors of neglect. The house belonged to Kevin Loudon and his wife, Angela.
The Loudons’ desire to be foster parents had been motivated by their misguided belief that the venture would be lucrative. The child-welfare system’s desire to have them as foster parents had been motivated by necessity. There were more children than places to put them.
The Loudons were gift horses into whose mouths the bureaucracy chose not to look too closely. They were sloppy, aggravated people who wore their disappointments like clumsily concealed war paint. Their failures had stayed stuck to them like gum to the bottom of a shoe. There was a row of aluminum lawn chairs and a pair of young boxer dogs, in a crate, on their sagging front porch. And in the yard at the back, there was an old Pontiac without an engine, and a brand-new cherry red motorcycle.
The interior of the house was surprisingly bright and clean. The walls were painted in pastels and the windows were hung with spotless curtains. The matched maple furniture, bought on credit from Sears, was dust-free and polished. Angela took pride in the rooms she inhabited, the same pride she had once taken in herself, in the days before she had become a Loudon—in the time when she had been Angela DiMarco.
Angela had been born in Middletown and had once been so beautiful that she’d made an altar boy’s knees buckle just by winking at him while she was kneeling at the communion rail of St. Sebastian’s Church.
And then she had married Kevin.
Kevin came from a large brawling family of swamp Yankees—an uneducated, prejudiced clan whose meager allotment of pride came solely from the fact that they were born and bred New Englanders. He was thin and wiry, and violent when he drank. He worked in a supermarket warehouse, forklifting canned soup and breakfast cereal and pinto beans, because the auto repair shop he’d started with his brother, and his time as an Amway agent, and the job selling swimming pools over the phone hadn’t made him rich, even though he’d been certain that they would.
Angela was now thirty-five and pregnant with a child she hadn’t planned, disappointed that she could no longer make men’s knees buckle with a wink, and unhappy that the man she’d married had taken her no farther than a dilapidated house with an engineless car in the yard.
Kevin and Angela had two preadolescent children—a daughter, Angie, and a son, Kevin Junior, who was deaf. And when, on an August afternoon, T
J came to them, they had their first foster child.
In the beginning, they’d been on their best behavior. It was as if they had been blessed with a paying guest who took up very little space, rarely spoke, and spent most of his time either silently looking at a set of photographs pasted into a spiral notebook or sitting in front of a miniature piano, teaching himself to play and producing disjointed, melancholy music. But it wasn’t long before the Loudons became accustomed to TJ’s presence and their old grievances and failures dragged them back to being themselves. By Christmastime, Kevin had begun drinking again, Angela was into the seventh month of her pregnancy, and they were arguing.
The argument was about money. It started at dinner and continued late into the night. When the muffled boom of their voices reached the room that TJ shared with Kevin Junior, TJ awoke. He sat up with a start and saw that Kevin Junior was asleep, cocooned in his deafness. TJ knew he was alone, and he began to shake.
Since he had been in the Loudons’ house, he had become terrified by, and schooled in, the rhythms of its violence—violence that was like a cradle being pushed and shoved, first by Kevin, then by Angela, each of them moving deliberately faster, until they rocked the cradle to the point of madness, until it exploded. Then there would inevitably come the sounds of objects being smashed, and Angela screaming, and the dogs barking, and Angie waking up and running from room to room, crying and begging her daddy to stop.
In the darkness of his bedroom, TJ knew from the roar of the voices in the living room that the chaos had been let loose, and soon the house would be raucous with shattering glass and breaking furniture. He scrambled out of his bed like a small wounded animal trying to outrun wildfire. He ran to the closet and took the spiral notebook out of the blue suitcase and quickly crawled back into bed. He lay with his trembling arms crossed on his chest, the notebook held tightly beneath them. The shaking in his body began to subside as he turned his face to the wall and said: “Do I know my name? Yes, I do. Yes I do … my name is Justin. And my name is Fisher, too.”
