Etched in Sand (8 page)

On the table between my elbows, Ms. Davis places pages and pages of lined paper with carbon sheets in between each page. She explains that there will be two copies of my affidavit—one for my file and one for the judge. She encourages us to start at the very beginning, as far back as we can recall. She instructs me what to write in the very first paragraph of the affidavit

I, Regina Marie Calcaterra, do swear that the information provided is a true description of my time with my mother, Camille Diane Calcaterra. The truthfulness of this affidavit is supported by my older sisters Cherie and Camille. Dated, November 1980.

Then Ms. Davis tells us the rest of the affidavit will be in our own words. At first we search one another’s faces for memories and details . . . but it doesn’t take long before it’s all flowing so fast that my pen can barely keep up with our words.

July 4, 1971

Four years old

M
AMA JUST GAVE
us each our own watermelon slice and sent us out to the picnic table, promising she’ll bring sparklers when we go into town to watch the Fourth of July parade. I take my watermelon under the redwood picnic table to see how many ants I can attract to our picnic. Mama always teases me, saying I’d prefer to live in a mud-pie mountain with ants, beetles, crickets, and lightning bugs as my neighbors over living with clean knees and fingers any day. Four white-sandled feet—Cherie’s and Camille’s—swing in my direction from the bench above. All their talk about this new mom and a new home distracts me from my ant collecting.

“If they adopt her, then we won’t see her ever again,” Camille says.

“They can’t adopt her,” Cherie says, “because Mom won’t let them. Either way, it’s bad for all of us.”

“How can Mom say what happens to Regina? Regina doesn’t even know Mom.”

“I know, Camille.”

“Mrs. G is her mom. I mean, how do you take a baby away from the person she thinks is her mom? She even calls Mrs. G ‘Mama.’ ”

“Camille, knock it off. Mrs. G is not her mom. And Regina’s not a baby—she starts kindergarten this year.”

“She shouldn’t even be in kindergarten yet, she’s only four!”

“Well, it’s that or she stays home with Mom all day!” Cherie says. “It’s safer for her to be at school! Stop arguing with me, wouldya? Regina belongs with us.” Cherie pauses from all her insisting to sigh. “I wish Mrs. G would adopt all of us,” she says. “I wish we could stay here.”

“Me too,” says Camille.

“Me too, me too!”

From above, my two sisters laugh at how I’ve chimed into the conversation. Cherie’s nicknamed both Camille and me “Me Too” because everything our older sister says, we younger sisters agree with. “You learned ‘Me Too’ at the Happy House,” Cherie says, leaning down and brushing dirt off my face. “Do you remember the Happy House?”

I shake my head. “What’s the Happy House?”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with Mama, Papa, and their teenage daughter, Susan. I love my mama and papa, but I spend every minute I can around Susan. She reminds me of a princess in her long, flowery dresses. I like to snuggle up with Susan and play with her silky light brown hair or let my tiny fingers get tangled in her long necklaces of leather and wood.

Cherie picks me up. She and Camille take my hands, and we walk to the house to find Mama. “This is the Happy House,” I tell Cherie.

“No, Gi, this is the Bubble House.”

“Huh?”

When we walk inside, Mama and Susan are crying in the kitchen.

“Why you cry?”

“You’re going to go live with your new mom now,” Susan says through her tears.

My head tilts with confusion. “I have a mama . . . you mean I have another mama?”

“You have two mamas. And a little brother, too!” Mama says.

“His name is Norman,” Cherie says.

I sort of remember calling someone else Mommy because she wanted me to call her that. I visited her house last Christmas. Mama dressed me like a princess in a crimson velvet dress, patent-leather shoes, and clean white stockings. Susan called the other mommy my Christmas Mama, because she wanted to give us Christmas presents. But I don’t know why I have to see her now—you don’t get gifts for the Fourth of July. “Is it Christmas Mama?”

They all start laughing until it seems like Mama might start to cry. “Yes, honey,” she says. “It’s your Christmas Mama.”

I smile around at all of them. “I get Christmas presents?”

Susan and Mama pack for my visit with Christmas Mama. I wonder why I need so many clothes? As Mama tucks stacks of folded laundry in a suitcase, she explains that, even though it’s summer, we need to pack warm clothes, too.

“Why?”

“Just in case you stay with Christmas Mama.”

“Until Christmas?”

Mama stays quiet a moment. “Yes.”

I move in to help them pack my bag of clothes, my dolls and stuffed animals, and my toy Baby Jesus, resting in a pile of plastic hay.

In the car, Cherie and Camille are silent. I chat away, bubbling over about Christmas Mama and hoping there will be new toys, baby dolls, and maybe even an Easy-Bake Kitchen so Mama and Susan can show me how to bake when Papa comes to pick me up from Christmas Mama’s house.

Papa slows the car, then pulls into a lonely building in the middle of a three-road intersection. “This is it?” he bursts. “This is where she’ll have them living?”

Susan whispers in a way that confuses me even more. “This is only a Christmas visit, Dad, remember?”

Papa snaps back. “Enough with the fairy-tale talk, Susan.” His voice is starting to sound like he’s choking, like a frog. “She’ll figure out what’s happening as soon as we leave.”

“No leave,” I say.

Everyone climbs out of the car, leaving Camille, Cherie, and me in the backseat while they unpack the trunk. I watch closely as Papa walks in the front door of the building and comes back out with his face all red. His neck is bulging. He looks scary. Then he yells. “This is a goddamn glue factory!” he says. I’ve never seen Papa so mad. “The apartment . . . is upstairs . . . from a goddamn glue factory!”

“Dad, shhh—”

“She couldn’t have found an apartment in a normal complex? She had to pick a damn glue factory in the middle of all this traffic?”

He tucks in his shirt like he’s trying to calm down, and he directs Mama and Susan with our luggage up the steps. Then he walks us to the side door. Papa stoops down and wraps Cherie and Camille in each arm. He hugs them with all his might, until he’s crying, and he collects himself to stand over them. “Stay strong and take care of one another,” he says. “Especially Regina. She needs her big sisters now more than ever.” Then he turns to me, scooping me up off the ground and letting me nuzzle my head in his neck and shoulders.

“Papa, why do you look so sad?”

“You know you’ll always be my princess, right?”

“I know, Papa,” I tell him, cupping my hand around his neck. “And you’re my king.” He squeezes me against him, and Mama and Susan turn their faces away. Papa gently places me next to my sisters and tells Mama and Susan in his froggy voice that he can’t go upstairs and he’ll be waiting in the car.

Mama clears her throat and takes Cherie’s hand, then Camille’s. The three of them navigate the narrow staircase together, their shoes on the hollow steps the only noise. Susan holds on to my right hand, and I hold the wooden banister with the left. “Hey, Susan, watch!” I do what she, Cherie, and Camille have taught me to do whenever I get scared or sad—I count. “One step, two steps . . .”

When I reach the platform, I look up at Susan. Why isn’t anyone skipping or smiling, or excited at all? Then a door opens. Christmas Mama is standing there.

She’s thin, and her very black hair is in a tight ponytail. Her eyes have a lot of makeup like a lady on TV. Her dress is long and black with a belt around the waist and no sleeves, and when I look at her feet, she has on sandles with a little heel. She seems pretty, but something about her is spooky, too. A tall, skinny man pops up behind her. Behind him walks a big, gray, hairy dog. I hide behind Camille. The dog sits next to the man.

Cherie and Camille allow Christmas Mama to hug them. “Welcome home, girls,” Christmas Mama says. Then she looks at me and points into the kitchen past a yellow Formica table with aluminum legs. She says, “Regina, I am your mother. I love you, and here is a Big Wheel.”

A Big Wheel?

My mother?

I hold Susan’s hand closer. Nobody here seems happy, and everyone is watching me. Like a robot on a cartoon, Christmas Mama stands there smiling, blinking, waiting for me to say something. Susan leans down and whispers, “Say thank you, Pumpkin. Look at your present.”

I look at the Big Wheel bike and then down toward the floor. I start whimpering, then it’s a full-fledged cry into Susan’s flowing skirt. “But I don’t want it,” I say. “It’s not Christmas.” My whimpers continue until Susan grasps me tighter. Finally, I turn toward Christmas Mama. I’m afraid to look at her so I don’t, but I tell her through my tears, “Thank you for my Big Wheel present.”

Mama says it’s time to go. She shakes Christmas Mama’s hand and tells her to take care of her little gifts. After we all get fast big hugs from Mama and Susan, they hurry down the stairs and disappear.

This visit feels different than the other Christmas visit did. I want Mama and Susan back, and I start to yell for them. Christmas Mama shushes me and takes us into a room with two little beds. My cries turn into a piercing wail. “
Mama! Mama! Mama!
”

Then it lands on my right cheek: a sharp front-handed slap. My head jerks toward my left shoulder but is jolted back with a backhanded slap to my left cheek that knocks me to the floor. “Stop crying or else I’ll really give you something to cry about, you little bitch!” she howls. “I’m Mom. You got that?
I’m
Mom.”

No, no, no. I look at Cherie and Camille. “This is our mom,” Cherie tells me. She looks sad.

“Listen to your big sister, you little whore. She’s right. You came from me, see this? From
this
belly. I’m your mom.”

No.

No.

No. I don’t want her for my mom. “I want Papa.”

“Oh, you want your father?” Christmas Mama says. “Well, he didn’t want you, and it’s no wonder, you goddamn little waste of skin. And he didn’t want me, either, so you just shut the fuck up about any
papa
. You got that? You do not want to get me started on that man, the arrogant, self-absorbed piece of shit.”

I almost cry again but Camille runs and puts her arm around my shoulders. Christmas Mama commands her and Cherie to go outside and bring up all our stuff. “I’ll deal with this bastard,” she says. She looks mad at me, and I want to cry again. I haven’t done anything bad. Mama and Susan never yelled at me this way.

Cherie and Camille stand in the door, staring with fear in their eyes. “You two go, goddammit!” she screams. When they run for the stairs, Christmas Mama tells me that she wishes I was dead, that I should have never been born. Then she bends over and grabs my right arm to yank me upright. She slaps both my cheeks again, then slams the door and locks it behind her.

I’m locked in that room for days. I’m only allowed out for potty, baths, and to eat. If I start crying, my sisters come running in and beg me to stop. They lead me in counting. We count. They leave. I sleep. I wake, and I sit there bored. I count. I count. I cry. They come back. I count.

The room is hot, so I take my clothes off to try and get cool. I climb on top of one of the beds and open the second-floor window, waiting for a breeze. Outside that window is a view of a big building with noisy red trucks that come out. Every afternoon there’s a loud, scary alarm that comes from a big yellow horn on top of the building. I stick my head out the window and look for someone to rescue me. When it’s clear that no one’s coming, I rest my chin in my hands and see what else is around: lots of parked cars along the tarred driveway downstairs, a forest across the street, a traffic light, and lots of cars with families driving by. I count the cars parked downstairs, and the ones driving by, and the shiny red fire
frucks
—a word Cherie and Camille taught me. I say it a lot because every time I do, they laugh until they fall on the floor, and that makes me laugh.

Christmas Mama finally tells me I can come outside and play with my Big Wheel, as long as I stop calling her Christmas Mama. “For Chrissakes, I told you! Just call me Mom,” she says. I nod.

Together my sisters carry my Big Wheel downstairs, where I can play on the sidewalk with cars whizzing by. I learn to stay quiet and just count, and this way I can stay outside all the time. When it gets really hot, I take off all my clothes and climb back on my Big Wheel, riding around in big circles to create a breeze to cool off. The glue factory workers run out and wag their fingers, stretching their necks for my mother or telling me I’m too young to play Lady Godiva. Then my sisters dash down the stairs and outside, chasing after me with my clothes in their hands.

But I guess I’ve shown Mom how well I can take care of myself because one day she tells me I’m going to live in Baby Norman’s bedroom. She says she’s tired from all the work she has to do with three messy girls living in her house now, and someone needs to take care of her little prince. Mom tells me I’ll need to clean Norman’s diaper and give him baths and teach him how to go potty like I learned. If he goes in his diaper it’s my fault, so I make sure he lives on the potty. When he stands up and tries to run away with no pants on, I chase him down the hall and lure him back with the toys Mom got him at the thrift shop. Mom teaches me how to wash and wring out his cloth diapers in the tub. “You never know, I might need them again,” she says.

We all have chores. Cherie and Camille have to cook and do the dishes. I have to dust and clean the bathroom. All of us take turns caring for Baby Norman.

At night, Mom’s husband, also named Norman, comes home and stumbles up the stairs in the dark. If he’s with Mom and they’re happy, they go to sleep and the house is all quiet. But if Norman gets mad, he beats Mom up, and then we have to be really, really good. If we don’t clean the house or change Little Norm’s diaper the right way, she beats us just like Big Norman beats her.