The bullet missed my head by about a foot. It blew a big hole in the wall just above my headboard. Amazingly, I didn’t even wake up. I never figured out if Hank deliberately shot over my head just to terrorize my mom – the same way he’d scared me with the devil painting – or if he missed because he was too drunk to shoot straight. Either way, it was another close call.
Hank wasn’t always a monster. I clearly remember loving him, because he was there for me after my parents’ difficult divorce. In the years after, I was desperate to see my father as much as I could – to still have him hold me and call me Sugar Bear. But that’s not how it worked out. I wound up only seeing my dad a handful of times a year. The divorce gave him visitation rights, but there were lots of times when a planned visit just didn’t happen. My mother remembers me getting dressed up and waiting on the porch for my dad to show up, then shuffling back inside hours later, heartbroken. Then again, my father remembers showing up for scheduled visits and finding no one home. Conflicting memories, different versions, no way to know the truth.
Then, when I was four, my mother got pregnant again. My first reaction when my mom told me was indignation – I was upset she and Hank made a baby without involving me. I didn’t know how babies were made – I figured it was like putting dough in an oven. All I knew is that it sounded fun, and I was mad they did it without me.
Naturally, I demanded my mother explain why they’d left me out. She knew I wouldn’t stop bugging her until I had an answer, so she sat me down and explained the facts of life. Was I shocked! But the very next day I pulled all the other kids around me at day care and proudly described to them where babies come from. The teacher didn’t much appreciate my little biology lecture, so she cut it short and ratted me out to my mom.
The truth is, I was just so excited by the idea of having a brother. I remember my mom showing me her positive pregnancy test – I probably insisted on seeing it – and me being mesmerized by this strange little vial (this was way before test strips). I made her leave the vial on top of the refrigerator for weeks, because I thought it was the baby and I wanted to watch him grow.
There was only one problem with getting a brother. Because there’d be a baby around the house, my dog, Critter, had to go. My mom and Hank kept telling me how great it would be to have a brother and how Critter was going to a wonderful new home, and, reluctantly, I agreed to give him away.
I waited on the front porch with Critter the day his new owners came to get him. They were a young couple, and they said they lived in a big house with a beautiful backyard that Critter would love. They said that I could come see him anytime I wanted. Then the man took Critter by the leash, led her into their car, and shut the door. And just like that, my only true friend was gone. For months afterward I asked my mom to take me to see her, but for whatever reason she never did.
I missed Critter badly, but even so I couldn’t wait until my brother arrived. Then, one morning when I was at day care, a teacher came up to me in the playground and said I had a phone call. No kid ever got a phone call, so I knew something was up. I ran all the way to the office and picked up the phone.
‘Guess what, Crystal?’ I heard my mom say. ‘You’re a big sister now!’
The next day, Hank took me to the hospital to meet my new brother, Jayson. I remember being surprised by how tiny he was. Back at home my mom let me hold him, and I was instantly in love.
I watched over Jayson like a lioness. He had wild red hair and he was a willful little firecracker, sweet as pie one minute and ornery the next. One time, I was pushing him on a baby swing in our backyard when a huge black dog ambled over from next door. This dog was bigger than both of us combined, and I was terrified. I tried to lift Jayson out of the swing, but his legs kept getting stuck. I looked back at the dog, which was getting closer and closer. Finally, I panicked and ran inside, leaving Jayson bobbing in the swing as the giant animal approached.
‘Mommy, Mommy, a big dog is going to eat Jayson!’ I screamed. My mom ran outside, and I expected to see the baby swing empty and the big dog licking his lips. Instead the dog was gone, and Jayson was swinging and smiling away. I’m guessing he might have given that mutt a good kick in the chops. That was my brother for you – a tough little cookie.
When I was eight or nine my mom let me start babysitting Jayson on my own. Most times it was fun – like when we watched the science show Mr. Wizard on TV, then tried to light a napkin on fire and burnt a watermelon-sized hole in the living room rug (well, it was fun until my mom got home). Other times, Jayson knew just what to do to get under my skin. He loved riling me up and jumped at any chance to do it. If I had a friend over, Jayson would run around in his underwear, because he knew it made me crazy.
Yet no matter how much we fought, I always felt extremely protective of Jayson, almost like I was his second mother. And, in many ways, I was. As things got more complicated and chaotic in our family, Jayson and I were often left to fend for ourselves. And as more and more of the family craziness got dumped on us, I tried even harder to shield Jayson from it, even if it meant absorbing more of it myself.
But I was only a child, too, and I’d learn I couldn’t always protect Jayson, or myself, from the harm that came our way. Like the big black dog that wandered into our yard, the evil that entered our lives was something I couldn’t stop – it was only something I could try desperately to escape.
Just around the time Jayson was born, my stepfather Hank’s younger brother Joe was murdered. I never got the full story, but I do know he was beaten to death in his own home. And I know that when it happened, it changed Hank profoundly. That was when he turned to drink and drugs.
My mom’s marriage became a nightmare of fighting and violence. But my mom was still very young and naïve and she didn’t realize what was causing Hank’s sudden transformation. So she cut him break after break, and she tried hard to make the marriage work. She even got Hank to go to counseling with her, though it never made much difference.
By then, Hank was like a runaway freight train, heading straight for a crash. He was sullen, withdrawn, wild, unpredictable. He constantly yelled at and badgered my mother, when he wasn’t disappearing on benders and binges. One night, Hank and my mom got in a vicious fight. I remember seeing her curled up on the ground, trying to block Hank’s punches. I ran to her and threw myself on top of her to protect her, and as I lay there shielding her, the sheer terror of it all made me wet myself.
Then came the evening Hank nearly killed me in my bed.
After Hank shot at me, my mother rushed into my bedroom, scooped me up, threw little Jayson in his car seat, and ran us out of the house. At the time, my father, Brad, was still living in town, and she drove straight to his house to ask if we could stay there. Their marriage had ended badly, and they both held a lot of resentment toward each other. But this was an emergency, and my mom felt sure Brad would take us in.
‘Crystal can stay here,’ my dad said, ‘but not you.’
My mother refused to leave me, so she got back in the car and drove to her friend Bridget’s home. I can only imagine how scared and vulnerable she must have felt to be turned away like that, but my mom just rolled with it and did what she had to do to protect her kids. In fact, I was still asleep in the car when all that happened, and my mother never even told me my dad turned us away. I only learned about it years later, in a talk with my father.
In hindsight, he says now, that decision is one of the biggest regrets of his life. But what I would come to realize is that he did what he did out of a deep well of pain. As a kid, I only heard my mom complain – and I only saw her pain – so I figured she was the only one who was hurt by the divorce. But my dad had been deeply hurt, too. After all, he’d lost his family.
I also learned that as soon as we left that night, my father got in his car and went looking for Hank. They knew each other and had once been friends, but on that night my dad wanted to kill him. Fortunately, he didn’t find him. If he had, life might have been much different for all of us – especially for my dad, who would probably still be in jail.
Hank’s descent into madness created an atmosphere of chaos in our home. And in that atmosphere bad things happened, and any chance to get them under control was lost. In the downward spiral of my mother’s second marriage, bad things only got worse. The regular working order of a family – parents watching over their kids, weeding out bad values, asserting good ones – completely fell apart. And Jayson and I, still just children, became vulnerable to a host of predators.