Etched in Sand (18 page)

Instantly, I begin to structure my days around a full day of school followed by gymnastics practice until six thirty, then babysitting and housecleaning jobs. In study hall, while the other kids sketch the logos of Van Halen and AC/DC on their notebooks, I doodle
Rosie
and
Norman
in hearts and bubbles with
mia bambina amore
and
je t’aime
scribbed around them. Any homework I don’t get done at school is a good excuse for me to maintain my privacy when I get home in the evenings.

One night in early October, Addie knocks on my bedroom door. “You have a visitor,” she says. Cherie appears behind her in the doorway, and Camille pops her head out of her bedroom.

“What are you doing here?” Camille says. “You never stop over without calling first.”

Cherie looks at the ceiling as if she’s praying to save her last nerve. “Cookie was driving drunk and she got into an accident,” she says. “She left the scene, and the police were looking for her . . . and . . . she skipped town with the kids.”

Camille asks, “Wait, I didn’t hear this part. What do you mean ‘skipped town’?”

Cherie says, “I got a call from Cookie’s friend Jackie Sones. You remember her? She lived near us in Saint James.”

“Jackie Sones—the one who moved to Idaho?”

“Yeah,” Cherie says, clearly dreading what she has to reveal next. “She told me Cookie is heading out there so she can live in Jackie’s trailer and work with animals on a farm. So, with the kids, off she drove.”

We walk out to the kitchen, where Addie gives us permission to call Ms. Harvey at home. “Girls, there’s nothing anybody here can do if your mother left the state.”

“Oh, big shock,” I say, “considering how much you did to protect them while they were here.”

It’s close to Halloween when Jackie Sones calls Cherie to tell her Cookie and the kids have arrived.

“They stayed with Jackie a few weeks until Cookie found a bowlegged old man named Clyde who lives on a farm in some town called Oakview,” Camille tells me.

“Let me guess, so she used her ways to convince him that he would be better off if her brood moves in.”

We learn that, to maintain her part of the bargain, Cookie volunteered the kids to work as farmhands. They rise every morning to milk the cows, shovel horse manure, bale hay, and tend the crops. “I know how this works,” I tell Camille. “If they don’t step up, they’ll get beaten.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Well, at least they’re in a small town. When we figure out how to fix this, hopefully it will be easy to find them.”

She gives me Clyde’s phone number, which Jackie shared with her. I pop more quarters in the pay phone. A gruff, bothered male voice answers. “Yeah?”

“Is this Clyde?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m Regina, Cookie’s daughter, calling from New York. Can you please put Rosie on the phone?”

After some murmurs and the croak of Cookie’s voice objecting in the background, I finally hear Rosie’s tender voice: “Gi?”

Tears gush out of my eyes.
“Bambina?”
I ask her. “Are you and Norman okay?”

She stays quiet.

“Is Mom standing right there?”

I hear her debating over how to respond. “Yeah.”

“Okay. I’m going to speak quietly, but here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to ask you some questions. If the answer is yes, you’ll pretend to answer me about life on the farm. Like, ‘Yes, there are lots of animals here.’ And if the answer if no, you’ll do the same thing—‘No, it hasn’t snowed here yet. Silly Regina, it’s only October.’ You ready?”

“Yes, there are lots of animals here.”

I giggle. “Good, you get it!” Through a conversation carried in this kind of code, Rosie makes it clear that she and Norm are attending school regularly, but also that Cookie and Clyde are abusing her. That night I call Ms. Harvey, who says the usual: “There’s really nothing we can do.”

Over the next week, I continue making these coded calls to Rosie and Norman, and they reveal as much as they can through the feigned conversations. Then I call information and ask for the number to the elementary school in Oakview, Idaho. “May I speak with the guidance counselor please?” I ask.

When he’s patched through I tell him about Cookie’s history and what’s been happening to Rosie. Then Cookie calls me at Addie’s to tell me the guidance counselor brought her in for a meeting to check out my story. “And when I asked the kids what the hell was going on, they told me the whole thing,” Cookie says. “You three have a code when you call here. You give them the third degree, then you think you have us all figured out. Well guess what,” she says with a low growl. “I told the guidance counselor the truth: that you’re a juvenile delinquent and alcoholic liar who was committed to a foster home to keep your ass out of jail. And do you think I was
proud
to tell him that Rosie is a promiscuous nine-year-old who made advances toward Clyde? Then when he rejected her, she started making up stories! That’s how it went, Regina. It was humiliating to talk about what derelicts my children have turned out to be. Although, knowing the kind of man your father is, I don’t know why I’m surprised. And for the record, the marks on her body?
Those
are from the farmwork. You don’t get to live and eat for free, in Idaho or Long Island or anywhere else.”

Sobbing, I call Ms. Harvey and beg her to speak to Rosie and Norm’s guidance counselor in Idaho and tell him that she outright lied to him about the kids and me. “Please, to hear this woman, she’s totally insane!”

Ms. Harvey refuses. “Your siblings are in the hands of another state now, Regina. For the last time, I’ll tell you: There is nothing we can do.”

“Ms. Harvey, you promised me you all would protect my brother and sister if I signed that report telling everything my mother has done.” I slam down the phone so hard, I see Pete rise from his recliner as I run down the hall to my room. In trying to help the kids, I’ve made it worse for them. Without me there to take Cookie’s abuse, Rosie bears the brunt of my attempts to save them. I’ve failed to protect her the way Cherie and Camille protected me. I want to tell Rosie that the brutality she’s enduring is torturing me, too.

I
T’S THE FALL
of tenth grade when the new county phone book arrives at Addie’s. I quickly rip it open and thumb my way to
A
:

Accerbi, Paul & Joan

I sigh with relief: My father’s still close; and if the phone book’s factual, so are all his relatives. I haven’t worked up the courage to contact him, but for now it’s enough to know that I could. On November 9, 1981—my fifteenth birthday—I begin a countdown for the thirty-six months I have to reach out to him before I might actually need to ask him for some help.

I hope he’ll be proud. I’m getting solid grades in all my classes, but history and English are where I’m earning easy A’s. I make sure I tell Mr. Kelly and Mr. Maguire how hard I’m studying, and they both begin to discuss college with me. “I know you’re a foster kid,” Mr. Kelly says after class one day, “but don’t believe what anyone else tells you. There
is
a way out of your situation: It’s through continuing your education past high school.” Then they both co-opt my guidance counselor to get in on the cause.

I feel torn for Camille’s sake. She also wants to go to college, but her senior class guidance counselor told her at the beginning of the year not to bother trying to get into the Fashion Institute of Technology, her dream school. “Concentrate on getting married and having babies,” her counselor told her. Unfortunately, that advice only further confused Camille because Ms. Harvey had recently told her that she was so detrimentally affected by how we grew up that she probably would never have a functional family of her own. Through all of my sophomore year, I watch Camille quietly prepare to move out of the Petermans’. The summer before my junior year, she moves out and lives with friends. She’s begun dating a handsome, gentle-spirited, blue-eyed boy named Frank, whom she met while out dancing, and she tells me that he’s starting to talk about marriage.
See?
I want to tell the social workers and counselors.
All of you were wrong; Camille’s going to be fine
. I block out everyone’s input except my teachers’, knowing my only hopes of ever rescuing Rosie lay in my understanding of how the system works and getting respect from the people who work in it. A thousand times a day I repeat this to myself:
College degree.

B
Y THE TIME
I turn sixteen during junior year, I’ve gotten a job at Rickel Home Center a few miles away from Addie and Pete’s. Until Sheryl takes a job at the register next to mine, the work is so boring that to make the time pass I talk to the customers in a British accent. Sometimes I walk all the way there, and other times I catch the bus that takes me a third of the way, then I walk the rest. Sometimes when they can, Addie or Pete will drop me off or my friends Erin and Tracey will give me a lift, now that they both have their permits.

Of course, friends with cars present the opportunity for more interaction with boys, because now we’re able to go places unsupervised. Addie reminds me to focus on my studies, and I tell her there’s no need to be concerned. I’ve started dating a boy named Eddie . . . but despite the appearances I create for his sake, I have no real interest in bonding with him. First, while he’s worried about soccer practice and trying to get me alone to make a move, I’m more concerned about my studies and plotting out my next conversation with Cookie to see how Rosie’s really doing. Plus, I know what troubles boys can bring—the same troubles Cookie’s always getting herself into. So with Eddie, I let on like I’m invested, while also doing my best to control my tendency to cut and run when he gets too close. There’s a much more important man tugging at my heart: Paul Accerbi, who, as of this autumn, no longer appears in the Suffolk County phone book.

For months after I notice his listing missing, I contemplate what to do. Finally, I rip out the page where his name used to be and study it on the annual February Disney World quest. While hidden away in the top bunk of the mobile home, I stare obsessively at the place where his name used to be . . . then something new jumps out at me: There’s an Accerbi in Lindenhurst, whose names sound familiar: Frank and Julia.
How is this just now coming to me?
I recall Cherie and Camille talking about an aunt Julie and an uncle Frank and the willow tree we would sit under with them. But with no phone on the camper, I can’t call my sisters to verify the memory.

Cherie and Camille used to tell me stories about different places we lived when I was little, and the names they’d given them all. There was the Bubble House and the Happy House and the Glue Factory and the Brady Bunch House. I learned the Bubble House was our first foster home, where we all slept in the same room and our foster parents and their daughter, Susan, would lull us to sleep by turning on a globelike machine that would spin around and show bubbles on the blue walls of our room. The Glue Factory was where we lived the longest as a family in Saint James. But I couldn’t remember living in the Happy House, a place were Cherie and Camille seem to remember that we three girls were loved, cared for, and fed beyond anything else we’ve ever experienced. As we moved from place to place, they would reminisce about the Happy House and the Bubble House—“At the Happy House, the curtains were always open to let the light in,” Cherie would say, or “When I hear this song on the radio, I always turn it up because it reminds me of the Bubble House.” Since we never could figure out where the Happy House was, we all finally agreed that it must have been born from our own folklore. We settled on the fact that we learned how to keep a home at the Bubble House.

But we’d also agreed that, at one point, there’d been an aunt Julie and an uncle Frank in our lives. There was something that made us believe they weren’t our true aunt and uncle, but people we’d met along the way.

As soon as Pete pulls the motor home back into our driveway in Centereach, I run out of the camper to the yellow kitchen phone and call Camille.

“Julia and Frank Accerbi—could they be the same people we called aunt and uncle?”

“Regina, maybe . . . maybe these people
are
related to Paul. But I don’t know how we would have known them, and I wouldn’t believe whatever crazy story Cookie would come up with if we asked her. It doesn’t quite fit together.”

But she didn’t rule it out . . . and I so badly needed to know if Paul had moved away or, God forbid, died, so I convince myself that they would know. For weeks, I rehearse draft after draft of what to write. On Easter, I select a note at random from a stack of the very best I’ve written. I address it to Julia and Frank Accerbi and include only my name and house number on the return address line—not the Petermans’ names, or their phone number. I don’t want any of the Accerbis letting the Petermans know that I’ve reached out to the man I believe is my biological father.

April 3, 1983

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Accerbi,

My name is Regina Marie Calcaterra. I am 16 years old and believe that Paul Accerbi is my father. I also believe that there is a possibility that you are related to him. If you are, please pass this letter on to him.

Dear Paul,

My name is Regina Marie Calcaterra. I am 16 years old and was born in November of 1966. I believe that you may be my father. I am now living in a foster home because my mother, Camille Calcaterra, was a bad mother, not because I was a bad kid. I divorced her several years ago so I can work toward taking care of myself. I have a B average in school, am on the gymnastic team, and work at Rickel Home Center at nights and on the weekends. I plan on going to community college when I graduate high school.

My mother told me that you were my father many times during my upbringing and she never strayed from her belief. Unfortunately my mother is an alcoholic and drug addict, which caused her to be incapable of caring for my siblings and me, so we spent most of our youth raising ourselves. When I turned fourteen, I asked the court to emancipate me from her so I could make my own decisions about where I should live and what school I should go to. I have been in this foster home for 2½ years beginning from when I was in the 9th grade. I am now in the 11th grade.