Matthew told me once that what his father intended to do, long before he married Miriam, was go into the seminary and become a Catholic priest. But then he got Miriam knocked up, and all hopes of the priesthood vanished in the air. Just like that.
“Knocked up?” I asked Matthew. I was young, like maybe ten or eleven years old. I knew what sex was; that Joseph taught me though he didn’t go as far as to give it a name, what it was he was doing when he came into my room at night. What I didn’t know was that what Joseph did when he lay on top of me, crushing me to the bed, a rubbery, wet hand pressed against my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, was the same thing that led to babies.
“Yeah,” he shrugged. Matthew was six years older than me and knew things that I didn’t. Lots of things. “You know. Pregnant.”
“Oh,” I said, still not sure how knocked up and pregnant had a darn thing to do with Joseph not becoming a priest.
Matthew rolled his eyes. “Duh.”
But that all came later, much later.
At first Matthew and Isaac, the both of them, wouldn’t have a thing to do with me. Joseph forbade it. Forbade them from talking to me. Forbade them from looking at me. Just like me, Isaac and Matthew weren’t allowed to do much of anything. There was no TV, no playing ball or riding bikes with the neighborhood kids, no listening to music, no books—none other than the Bible, of course—and when Matthew and Isaac came home from school with something or other to read, Joseph would hold it up disapprovingly and call it blasphemous.
Momma and Daddy hadn’t been religious at all. The only times they talked about God were what I later came to know as in vain. We didn’t go to church. There was only a drawing of Jesus in the old prefab house, which Momma said used to belong to her own mom and dad, and we kept it in the kitchen, and more than anything else, it covered up a hole in the wall where I accidentally threw a ball when Daddy and I were playing catch in the house. The man in the picture might as well have been the president of the United States for all I knew. He might have been my grandpa. We never spoke of the picture. It was just there.
“You’re telling me your foster father sexually abused you,” Ms. Flores says, though her eyes say I’m full of it. Full of crap. “You ever tell your caseworker about this?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why not? She checked up on you, did she not? Brought letters from Paul and Lily Zeeger.”
I shrug. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Then why didn’t you tell her?” I look out the one barred window placed too high on the wall for me to see what is outside. There’s just a hint of blue sky, some white fleecy clouds. I fantasize about what’s on the other side: a parking lot, cars, trees.
The caseworker was okay. I didn’t hate her. She drove a beat-up junker car and carried about half a million case files in a mangled Nike bag that, at the age of thirty or maybe forty, made her back sag like those old ladies with osteoporosis. She worked out of her car, with all her files stored in the backseat. She moved from group home to foster home, back to group home, meeting with all the kids on her ever growing caseload. Apparently she had an office—somewhere—but I don’t think she was ever there. She was nice enough, but she was up to her ears in her caseload (if she told me that once, she told me a thousand times) and half the time when she showed up, she thought my name was Clarissa and once or twice, Clarice. She talked fast and moved faster. She wanted things done.
The day I went to live with Joseph and Miriam was just one more checkmark on her to-do list.
“You see, Claire, I’ve seen your files. I know that your caseworker made visits to the home, to Joseph and Miriam’s home, and I know that this so-called sexual abuse was never discussed. What was discussed at these visits—” she reaches down into a briefcase at her feet and pulls out a chunky green file, flipping to a page she’s marked with yellow sticky notes “—were your mood swings, your quick temper, your refusal to follow rules, complete chores, obey orders, your defying authority, your poor grades in school.” She sits, still as a mouse, her eyes bearing down on me across the table, and then adds, “Your flights of fancy.”