The police had been to their trailer many times. When they showed up they frequently ended up arresting Sally and some of the other people in the house. Sally rarely spent more than a night in jail. Vito always refused to bail her out, but he would come pick up Angela. By hook or by crook, Sally always got out. Either the charges were dropped or she was given probation.
She got into heroin at different times, and several times had gone to the emergency room with an overdose. Some of those times it had been Angela who had to call 911. Each time the hospital brought her back to life.
Several times, to stay out of jail, she had gone to rehab. When she got out, and was off heroin, she was almost immediately drawn back to meth. Angela didn’t want her mother to die, but she envisioned that if she did, Angela would then be able to live with her grandparents and not have to be near Sally’s friends.
The living room of their trailer was often filled not only with a boyfriend but with strangers, mostly men, often snorting drugs from the mirror on the coffee table, or smoking crack, or shooting up. Sally preferred to live her life in a stupefied state.
That often led to trouble for Angela. The people hanging around the house would frequently offer Angela drugs, encouraging her to try this or that, and then laugh when Angela only glared as she went past them to the refuge of her bedroom.
Sally didn’t work. She scraped by on welfare checks, child assistance, food stamps, and a variety of other assistance programs. She got all the needles she needed from clean-needle programs. People came around the trailer park handing them out like candy on Halloween. If she had no money to buy drugs, her male “friends” who always seemed to be hanging around their trailer, her sketchy boyfriends, or a dealer was always willing to provide drugs in exchange for sex. More than once Angela peeked out her bedroom door to see several naked men strutting out of her mother’s bedroom.
Angela knew that one of those slimeballs, or any one of the random men just like them, had fathered her. Who, exactly, no one knew. It was a matter that was rarely discussed, not because they thought it was shameful, but because it was as unknowable as it was unimportant.
Sometimes, when she had been in bed under the covers, she heard the men drinking with Sally out in the living room joking about who Angela looked like. There was never agreement. Someone would throw out a name and everyone would laugh, or groan “No way!” Angela’s father was just one of the random tweaker boyfriends, or a friend of a friend who had some money, or some shady drug dealer her mother fucked for some meth.
That union of two dysfunctional, unstable psychos had resulted in a pregnancy.
The seed that had been planted from that union of degenerates grew and developed in a continual broth of drugs and alcohol.
Angela was the mess that resulted, the little girl born broken.
NINE
Angela’s grandparents vehemently disapproved of their daughter’s lifestyle, but after a lifetime of trying everything they could think of to straighten her out, they eventually came to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do about it. Sally always refused any kind of advice or help, usually at the top of her lungs. Angela remembered epic arguments and Sally throwing things at her father. She insisted there was nothing wrong with her and that she had everything under control. She said it was her life and she was living it the way she wanted.
Angela knew that Sally was loony tunes.
Sometimes people were simply stupid, and there was no fixing stupid.
Angela loved her mother, yet had been disappointed by her so many times that she had come to love her in an at-arm’s-length way, part of it snippets of rare smiles and hugs, most of it fantasies of what it would be like to have a real mother.
On the other hand, she adored her grandparents. She loved nothing more than being with them. They were stability and safety and the comfort of unwavering love.
She was often afraid of the men who always seemed to be hanging around their trailer. Angela hated to have to be in the house when her mother was out of it or unconscious—or getting laid—and there were men about. Her grandparents were her refuge from that ever-present, shadowy threat.
When she had just grown into her teens, one of those men, Frankie, her mother’s more-or-less regular drug dealer and boyfriend, began to lose interest in having sex with Sally in exchange for drugs. Drugs and alcohol had taken their toll on Sally’s once-good looks. His fixation began to turn to Angela.
That first time it happened was as terrifying as everything Angela had imagined it would be. She lived in fear of those men, always worried what they might do to her.
She found out one night when Frankie came into her bedroom after her mother passed out.
Much like her mother, Frankie was skin and bones. The teeth he wasn’t missing were yellow and rotting. High on meth, he grinned like death itself as he pulled her clothes off. He warned her what would happen if she didn’t keep quiet. Angela knew Frankie well enough to know he did not make idle threats. He groped her a bit and then stripped down to his bony self. It was like being raped by death without his black robes.
He held a knife up to her face as he was forcing himself into her. After he finished, he leaned in close and whispered that if she told anyone, anyone at all, he’d skin both her and her mother alive. Angela believed him.
While Angela was never close to her mother, she couldn’t understand why Sally seemed to care so little about her, or herself for that matter. Even so, Angela didn’t want her hurt and she certainly didn’t want her to be murdered.
She was terrified of being cut by Frankie. She knew what he was capable of. After all, he’d just raped her.
Rather than leave after he was finished, he sat on the edge of the bed for a while, stroking her hair, whispering to himself how hot she was. Before long, he got it up and was on her again. She pleaded for him to stop. Frankie told her to shut the fuck up or he’d cut her throat.
She cried as quietly as she could through the ordeal. She bit the inside of her cheek to distract herself when he was hurting her. She wasn’t sure exactly how long he had her in her back bedroom of the trailer, but she knew it had lasted hours.
When it was finally over, she lay quietly, listening until she heard the screen door bang shut. Frankie had finally left. There was no one else in the trailer but her mother. Angela lay in bed shaking until she worked up the courage to go into her mother’s room. Sally lay sprawled on her rumpled bed, dirty clothes thrown everywhere, only barely conscious. Angela shook her mother’s arm to wake her. Sally mumbled incoherently.
Angela knew that Frankie had given her mother extra drugs to make sure she didn’t interrupt him. Despite Frankie’s warning that if she said anything to anyone he’d cut her, Angela’s outrage at what he’d done to her was stronger than her fear. He’d already hurt her. She was already bleeding.
She shook her mother harder, crying as she told her that Frankie had raped her. Her mother’s answer was to mumble something dismissive before slipping back into unconsciousness.
Angela’s tears stopped as she grew angry with herself for thinking that her mother would care what happened to her, much less do anything about it. What was her mother going to do? What could she do? Angela knew the answer. Nothing.
She went out into the living room and called her grandparents, the tears returning, and asked if they could pick her up and she could stay at their house even though it was a school night. They knew by her voice that something was wrong. When they arrived, it felt like she was being lifted out from the depths of hell. In the car, even as ashamed as she was to say it out loud, Angela told them that Frankie had raped her.