Heart Scars

by Jeanette Lukowski

  I mentally coached myself through the next few minutes: deep breath, then ring the front door bell.

  No answer. But I had noticed that there were lights on inside, so I walked around the corner of the house to see if there were any movements.

  When I discovered that there were no curtains on the living room windows, I was embarrassed for the woman I could see lounging on the couch, illuminated by the glow of a television placed somewhere along the wall that I was looking in through. Thankfully, I didn’t see any kind of movement suggesting that she had seen me, so I resolutely went back to the front door and knocked this time—loud enough to be heard.

  The woman came to the door right away. I took a deep breath as she looked down to locate the doorknob and pull the door open, plastered a smile on my face the best I could, and asked for her daughter by name.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “Are you Allison’s mom?” Her voice was very high and thin, like her daughter’s, unlike mine.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, the girls are supposedly together,” she continued. My brain registered the “supposedly,” but let her continue uninterrupted. “. . . and Allison might be spending the night?”

  “I don’t know,” I managed to say in a well-regulated tone of voice. “I can’t get hold of Allison, and when I tried calling your daughter, she said something about Allison . . .” I repeated the earlier phone exchange I had with the daughter to her mother.

  “Oh, my,” she said, even though her tone never came close to the level of concern I was working so hard to suppress. “Let me try giving her a call. Come on in.”

  I stepped into the house, letting the screen door shut behind me while the mother crossed the room to retrieve a phone, but I would not enter farther in than the entryway. Part of me didn’t feel comfortable enough to enter the house under this pretense of being on friendly terms, while another part of me already was acknowledging the likelihood that the friendship between the girls wasn’t going to extend beyond that evening. After all, I was “outing” Allison as a girl with a hovering mother to her new friend, without the girl knowing why my hovering was justified.

  “Hi, honey,” the mom said into the phone. “Allison’s mom is here—is she with you?”

  The mother listened for a few minutes. I could hear parts of her daughter’s explanation, but not all of it. There was something about how Allison was at the park two blocks away from where I was currently standing, and that she was currently walking over to meet Allison. The mother then said, “No, no one is in trouble. You girls just need to come back over here, so that we can all talk.”

  It took every ounce of my being just to stand there while the mother closed her cell phone and slowly relayed the balance of the conversation to me. “They’ll be here in a couple of minutes,” she finished.

  Unfortunately, the adrenaline which had begun coursing through my body for most of the past hour was still raging, and there was no way I was going to be able to quietly stand there in the entryway of their house, making small-talk with this stranger, and then let her be in charge of the interrogation when the girls finally arrived. If the school principal had gotten it wrong on April 17, there was no way this tiny, light-voiced woman was going to get it done to my satisfaction either. “Thanks,” I said. “But I’m just going to walk over there, because there’s a boy over there that Allison’s not supposed to be seeing anymore. I’ll just leave my car here, and walk over there.” I said it all so quickly, and turned on my heel so abruptly, the other mother never had a chance to stop me.

  The more steps I took away from their house, the more my body wanted to break out into a run. I had sandals on, though, and didn’t want to fall on the way over to catch my daughter with some boy. Besides, how powerful and intimidating would I appear to teenagers if I were to arrive all out of breath from running, with bloody hands and knees from falling in the middle of the street? Power walking was going to have to suffice.

  When I was still about half a block away from the park, I heard Allison yelling, “I’m okay, Mom.”

  The hell you are, sweetheart, my brain answered back. You are in huge trouble.

  A few yards closer, she yelled to me again, “I’m okay, Mom. You can go.”

  I noticed that her tone of voice was getting a little louder and a little shriller as I closed the distance between us. While I didn’t say anything out loud, that didn’t stop me from responding in my head, Um, I don’t think so, dear. I’ve come this far now—I’m going to see this one all of the way through. And I soooo want the boy that you are probably with to hear this too, because I need to establish the fact that I am one mother who will not tolerate being toyed with, ever again. So, like it or not, Allison, you’re about to get exactly what you have been asking for since Wyoming—my supreme attention.

  When I finally reached her, I could see that there were six teenagers at the park. While it irritated Allison to have me there, treating her like a child, I didn’t care. I had almost lost her once already—I wasn’t going to take that chance ever again.

  Without crying, which is what the adrenaline rush now wanted my body to do out of relief at seeing her, I calmly but firmly told Allison that we needed to talk, and made her walk the few blocks back to her new friend’s house with me. She didn’t want to talk, of course. She just wanted to know if she could still spend the night.

  “I don’t know, dear,” I finally responded. “I need some answers first.”

  “But she doesn’t know anything about it,” Allison whined—the “it” being her running away in April.

  In hindsight, I don’t know if Allison’s claimed ignorance was real, or if it was just her hope. This was a relatively small town we lived in at the time, a town of about 13,000 people. While it was true that we didn’t know much of anyone in town at that point, I later discovered that Allison’s new friend was quite the rule-breaker herself—and may have chosen to be friends with Allison based on a belief that they were kindred spirits. At the time, I simply said, “That’s fine, dear. I don’t have to tell her.”

  While it was difficult for me, I still believed that it was important to both Allison and me that she have opportunities to re-establish some trust with me, so I re-joined Tommy in the car at 10:00 p.m. and watched Allison and her new friend go into the house—for the night, I hoped and prayed.

  At 10:50 p.m., Allison called the house phone. “Can you bring my sweatpants?” she asked

  Sigh. “Where are they?” I said out loud.

  “In the dryer.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right there.”

  * * *

  The friendship with that girl was pretty short-lived. Six months later, she would be the only friend of Allison’s I would no longer want to give rides to or want Allison to hang out with at the mall. Rather than remembering me as the mother who drove her daughter’s sweatpants over in the middle of the night, the girl chose to focus on the phone calling, hovering side of my personality instead. She made public pronouncements, including sending Allison a text message voicing her opinion that “Allison’s mother is a real psycho.”

  I was concerned about when I would be able to relax again about Allison being out of my sight.

  * * *

  Allison’s next sleepover opportunity came on Saturday, March 6, 2010. Samantha, her best friend from grade school and middle school years, had gotten in touch with her the Sunday afternoon before, so the entire week had been spent anticipating and planning the Saturday night sleepover.

  Since our move back from Wyoming had placed us in a town about three and a half hours north of Samantha, the kids and I drove to my mom’s house Friday night, spent the night there, and then I drove Allison to Samantha’s house Saturday afternoon. It was only as the evening hours set in that I realized how uncomfortable the sleepover was going to be for me.

  About 9:00 p.m.,
I sent Allison a text message: “I’m going to keep this on all night for you, okay?”

  About 10:00 p.m., I sent her a check-in text: “How ya doin’?”

  She responded “Okay” within a minute.

  Knowing that she and Samantha had been friends for almost ten years, and that I knew where both of Samantha’s parents lived and had each of the parent’s home phone numbers helped to ease my anxiety a bit—but I was a thirty-minute drive away from Allison, the girls were both sixteen now, and Samantha had an eighteen-year-old boyfriend who could legally drive.

  On the other hand, I had to trust Allison. My mantra since her sixteenth birthday had been: I have to let her live, I have to let her make her own decisions, I have to let her trust her gut to make the right decisions, I have to let her grow up. So, I sent her one more text message about 11:00 p.m., telling her that I loved her, and wishing her a good night, to which she replied within a minute.

  When I finally approached the bed that night, I set my cell phone on the nightstand and was instantly propelled back to April 25, 2009, when I had slept for only three hours before getting the text message that Allison was getting off the bus in Chicago.

  I calmed myself down, reminding myself that Allison was with Samantha. I told myself I was just taking the phone with me for Allison’s peace of mind, not mine.

  When the cell phone made its inbound-text alarm at 4:43 a.m., my heart flew out of my chest, my eyes instantly opened, and I lunged for the phone on the nightstand. With shaking hands, I slid my phone open and pressed Open Message.

  “Could you bring contact lens solution with when you come? Water isn’t working,” read the message from Allison.

  Whew. “Yep” was the message I sent back, after collapsing back onto the bed in relief. Allison was safe, everything was going to be fine.

  * * *

  Would we ever be “fine”? Would I ever feel like the average family down the street? It’s hard for me to imagine that they are keeping secrets too. I wish we could all just be honest with each other. Compare stories. Reveal our scars.

  12. Counseling

  When I brought Allison back from Chicago in April 2009, I knew it was time to find another counselor. I had been to see one after Frank’s verbal abuse escalated to physical abuse on Labor Day weekend in 1997, and it was only during therapy I was first able to tell anyone that he had pushed me. We had been arguing again, but I had turned to walk away. With both hands, he pushed me. I fell on the living room floor, a full ten feet from where he stood.

  In Wyoming, Allison and I had seen a therapist about her cutting. The therapist decided two sessions with Allison was enough, though she wanted to see me for the next several months. I was angry with the idea of being blamed for a Allison’s self-destructive behavior, but I went anyway. Once the counselor realized I wasn’t the cause of Allison’s cutting, she turned the focus of the sessions to how I was coping as a single-parent.

  Allison was agreeable enough about seeing a counselor in the beginning. During the first two sessions, the three of us sat in the room together, but I never felt like I could be fully honest in some answers. I was afraid Allison would focus only on the criticism, and use them as an excuse to run away again. After the third session, she even started to sound like Frank, saying things like, “Mary [the counselor] doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” By the third session, Mary would meet with only one of us for part of the time. The last five minutes would be spent together, when Mary would share some of the feelings Allison or I had revealed about our relationship.

  * * *

  July 6, 2009

  Mary gave me an epiphany in counseling one day, right before the hour was up. She had simply asked how things were going.

  “Fine, I guess. Allison’s constantly chatting with a new boy on her cell phone—”

  “Is he local?” Mary interrupted.

  “No.”

  Allison always had the same story: she had met the boy when we lived in Wyoming, and he moved to another state, the same as we did. I remember watching the counselor’s face change expression the tiniest bit as I repeated what Allison had told me. I wanted to shout “Don’t judge me!” to the counselor, but kept it to myself. The mission in counseling, for me, was to say as little of value as possible, and get out before she could tell me how this or that was my fault.

  When Allison joined us, the counselor asked her the same question, “How’s it going?” Maybe five or ten minutes later, the counselor made the suggestion that Allison had conversations with distant boys (or men) because it was easier for her, in her current state of anxiety, to deal with people at a distance rather than facing close-up relationships—and subsequent rejections.

  That gave me a whole new perspective on everything. Through that lens, I could see that running away wasn’t so much a thought-out plan as it was a response to what someone told her to do—the same way she would do whatever her father, her mother, her teacher, or her grandmother told her to do. The predator sent her bus tickets. She believed this was out of genuine love for her, and did what he told her. Finally, I knew the kind of conversations I would need to be having with her going forward, including the reality that might have been awaiting her had she made it all of the way to the east coast. Thank God for second chances.

  * * *

  Although Tommy had lived through the weekend of April 24 with me, I worked very hard to keep the details of that weekend from him. He never went to a counseling session with us, never went to court with us, and never read the transcripts of her testimony. Just as Officer Richards had suggested the Saturday morning we met, Tommy didn’t need to know the details.

  I was concerned, though, about Tommy feeling left out. From a child’s perspective, spending so much one-on-one time with one child means to the other child that the parent likes the first child more. I decided it was time to follow up on a mid-winter promise I had made. Tommy and I were going to put together a basketball hoop.

  Tommy got his first basketball hoop when he was a toddler. I don’t remember who gave us the hand-me-down Little Tykes plastic basketball hoop, I just remember it being in the corner of our nearly-empty living room after their dad moved out. When the weather got warm enough to play outside, the basketball hoop got moved out to the deck, then to the driveway after all of the snow and ice melted from the roadway. From that day forward, Tommy was hooked by basketball. If the neighbor boy, also named Tom, was out playing basketball with his friends in the driveway next door, I would find my son sitting under the apple tree about four feet away, waiting for the “big boys” to invite him in to take a shot or two at their regulation-sized basketball hoop. When the teenagers would leave on their skateboards, or go into the house to hang out together, my Tommy would run back over to our driveway, get his basketball from the garage, and play out the rest of the game.

  We bought his next basketball hoop from the big-box-store in the next town over when Tommy was about eight or nine. I think I started to put it together by myself, and then called the handyman, Mark, to finish the assembly job. When it was time to move out west, I bought a house that had its own regulation-sized basketball hoop cemented into the ground on the edge of the driveway, so we sold the box-set basketball hoop in our pre-move garage sale for about twenty dollars. Unfortunately, when we moved back to Minnesota, the house we bought had no basketball hoop, and Tommy spent his first year in basketball withdrawal. I viewed constructing the basketball hoop as a bonding project for us to work on together. He was going to use it to show me how he had grown.

  The basketball hoop came in a box so big and bulky it had labels explaining how two people were required to take it off the shelf.

  Then we had to load it into the car. At the time, we owned a 1995 Mitsubishi Expo. Thanks to the hatchback and the two rows of bench seats that folded down, Tommy and I were able to slide the box into the car. This meant t
hat Tommy would be lying down in front of the box for the drive home, and Allison and I occupied the only two visible seats left in the car.

  We pulled into the garage at about 7:00 p.m. on a Friday night, and I was tired and hungry. I would have been more than happy to wait until the next morning to begin assembly of the basketball hoop, but my thirteen-year-old “boss” begged, “C’mon Mom, let’s start putting it together!”

  “But, Tom, I’m so tired. Let’s wait until tomorrow,” I said.

  “No, Mom, let’s do it now!” he yelled while heading off to the door that separated the kitchen from the garage.

  “Fine. We’ll start, but we’re not going to get it all done tonight, dear.”

  By the time I had gotten out to the garage, Tommy already had the back of the car hanging open and was trying to push the box out. I suggested that we simply leave the box in the car, open it, and remove the pieces as we needed them. He ran back into the house, grabbed the scissors from the cup on the kitchen counter, snapped the plastic straps loose from the box, opened the box, and began grabbing random parts.

  “Tom, stop. Why don’t we just pull out what we need first, and leave the rest of the pieces in the box where they won’t get lost.”

  He grudgingly accepted that suggestion, then located the assembly instruction booklet so that he could study it while I put together the first two sections of the main support pole. Together, we got the third pole-section set, assembled and attached the support struts to the base and then the pole. All the while, Tommy was removing the leadership reins from my hands. He quietly began working on the backboard section while I was distracted with a question by his sister. When the fourth or fifth mosquito bit me, I made him put it all back into the garage for the night. It was 9:30 p.m.