My name is Heather Clay.
I am the youngest of three. One brother named David and a sister named
Angie. We have two parents Richard and
Tammy. If you view us from afar, we look like a loving family, but up close
there is sadness.
I thought I would tell my story. Excuse the lack of detail,
but I thought it better to skim through my life story, as to not make you pity
me or think me something I am not. It’s better that way…for me at least.
My sister and I are less than a year apart. Our brother is
two years older than us. All three of us were close when we were younger, our
parents loved us, and we were happy. We saw our relatives often and played with
our cousins, while our parents hung out with our aunts and uncles. Then one day
we packed up and moved across the country and left everything we knew behind. I
was around five then. Away from our aunts and uncles, cousins, and everything
we knew. I started to notice small things about my parents that I didn’t notice
before. At first, I thought nothing of it. Until one day, a few years down the
road, when my parents were in another room and I started to hear sounds like
whispers through the wall as I tried to sleep, then came the knocking as the
whispers stopped, footsteps took its place as a new voice…male, echoed across
the house.
I’ve never heard this particular voice before, of course
being the youngest I should have been sleeping like my siblings and old enough
to know better, but instead I quietly opened the bedroom door and walked out of
our room into the hall, down the hall and around the corner until I reached the
front room. They didn’t see me, but I heard angry voices and the new man saying
something to dad, while mom tried to tell them to calm down. The man stepped toward
her, and I squeaked, they stopped talking as they turned and saw me. The man
said something under his breath to my father, looked back at me and walked out
of the front door. My mother a bit shaken but relieved he left, brought me back
to my room. That wasn’t the last time I’d be seeing that man. A few months down
the road and he was back, the exchange between him and my father didn’t take
long, but whatever it was they were doing didn’t sound good. Unfortunately, this
wasn’t the last time I would see him, but before the next meeting came, we
packed up what little we could and left to go back to Hackensack, NY. I was
near 10 by this time, it took us 5 years to come back for good. At least I
thought it would be for good.
So, here we are 10 years old and, in a couple, more years I
will be in middle school. I will learn I
am no longer daddies’ little girl. My brother will no longer be his
happy-go-lucky self and my sister will become quiet and fall into step with
whatever happens just to not be seen. To everyone’s disappointment and or
relief depending on how you see it and from whose eyes you see it through, I
will still be me. But let’s not jump too far ahead.
A year into us living back home, (by home, I mean in the
state in which I was born and raise for the first 5 years of my life), the
knocks on the door started back up, almost every night a visitor. With each
knock, a smoke-filled house. I no longer left my room after the first few
times, because I started to feel weird each time I went out from behind my
closed door and then I would wake up in the morning and not remember sleeping,
for an 11-year-old, this was not a normal thing, so I’ve heard. Staying in my
room, with the door closed and a blanket stuffed against the crack would help a
little, it would relieve me of the thick smoke outside my door, and the stares
of the newest strangers.
Four years of constant partying by my parents and sometimes
me and my siblings. It wasn’t hard, we could sneak off with whatever we could
grab because party supplies were everywhere and never in short stock. By now,
being a teen, I could always get one of the strangers to get me a beer or two.
Not that I couldn’t get it myself, but this at least stopped my father from
yelling at me to stop mooching and buy my own. Did you guess by now I wasn’t
daddy’s little girl anymore? Good, that
means you are still with me and paying attention. My brother is now 17 years
old and never usually home and he has pretty much turned into our father. With
this I don’t mean when he loved me, or even when he was just nice to me, I mean
the new version of the father I have come to know. Together they are always
“teaching” me my place and my sister is stuck in the middle. Luckily the middle
child is usually ignored. Nevertheless, once I “learn” my place, she is there
by my side passing me the blunt to kill off some of the emotions that ran
through me, in turn which my emotions cut off it also helped with forgetting
the pain that lesson caused me.
I wanted to leave, I always wanted to leave but I never
stayed away. I always went back hoping my brother and father turned back into
the people that used to love me. It’s a dream and I must hold tight to it, or
I’ll become lost like my mother and silent like my sister. My mother never
speaks anymore, she just stays away and when she is around, she takes their
side to stay out of trouble. I know it is because she believes if she doesn’t stick up for me it will save me from being punished more. But little does she know; I
would fight harder if I had someone on my side.
My once loving family is now full of smoke and mirrors,
hiding hatred from the outside world and yet we are still together. When my
father gets himself into trouble, we pack up and we run from whatever issue is
closing in on us. We can never stay, yet we always move to the same states,
across the country and back again. So, on top of my staying, I don’t understand
what he is thinking when we run… Do the issues they try to avoid by running
disappear or do they just get taken care of when we are gone… It is scary that this
person I call father is capable of anything. It is scary that this person I
call father allows me to get pummeled, and even roots for more, has enough
power to just get rid of any issue that gets in his way. Maybe that is why I
stay, at least this way I stay alive, at least for now. In a years’ time, I
will find out just how scary it can get. My father and brother will be high as
a kite on who knows what and my sister, she will try to rescue me until she
can’t.
But before we get to that point, I do find happiness in the
form of a reader. I call him this, because when I first met him, he was walking
out of a used bookstore with his face in a book, I was walking with my head
down trying to hide my healing face and we slammed into each other. It was fate
for he pulled me from darkness at least for small moments in time. His name is
Otis. When I am with him I can make-believe my family is like they used to be,
but underneath my smiles and laughter I am just scared he will find out the
truth about them. The truth about me, how I choose to go back, how I choose to
cover my bruised with makeup and hid my scares under clothes. How I built a
mental wall to hide who I truly am. What will happen when he finds out? Because
next time I may not be able to hide it…
I’m only 17 years old and I am already tired…so extremely
tired. I smoke to kill the pain, and I
drink to forget the past. I mentally chained myself to this family if that is
what we can still call us. The ones that raised me to understand without them,
I’d be nothing. I’ve seen the other side, the side that dragged me up out of
this mindset that I keep fogged over. But with him my mind slowly clears, and
the fears of my father seize to exist.
Otis may not know the extent of my family issues, but I couldn’t hide
every bruise and he had to be told a small piece of that truth. He promised to
take me away, he told me I was stronger than them. He told me to take my sister
and run, because he promised he would be there to take us both in. That night I went home with my mind spinning,
trying to imagine that other life…free of drugs, free of drunken memories, free
of strangers staring at me like I was a magazine. I didn’t tell him everything as I said, but
just enough for him to understand I needed help.
I waited for my sister to come into our room, as she walked
in, I told her to pack a bag, we were leaving for good. While she packed, we
tried to work out the best way to tell mom so she would understand why we must
go, and that we wanted her to go too. But she knew she never would leave him or
her son, no matter how bad it got because she believed if she stayed, he, too,
would stay safe. My sister and I had our backpacks stuffed with clothes,
hygiene products, money, and a few keepsakes… My mother wouldn’t come, but she
didn’t try to make us stay. She knew it was bad for me and only getting worse.
She knew me and my sister together would be safer than we would be apart. Our
plan was to head to Otis’s apartment until we had a strategy and a way to keep
ourselves safe and out of reach of our father’s grasp. After this Otis will
deserve my true story, the whole story, the one I am still scared to share with
him. What happens if I do get the courage, will he ask us to leave? I’ll need
to wait until we have a set plan in motion…just in case. Right! Back to what I,
or should I say we, were doing. We kissed out mother goodbye and told her we
would let her know, somehow, when we settled. With one last look at our home
and mother I turned the doorknob to leave and ran right into my brother.
They must have been to their dealer’s house, he reeked of
smoke, his eyes bloodshot and speech a little slurred. His anger to my bumping
him was deadly and I knew at the moment I didn’t make it out in time.
David pushed me back into the house with my dad following
behind him, saying nothing about the shove David just gave me. “David, stop!” He had me in his grip again, I
couldn’t even push him off of me to get away. Angie must have known something
bad was going to happen, as she tried to pull me from his grasp. She couldn’t
get him off of me by pure strength, but her jumping into help me, throw him off
enough to escape and move further away from him, Angie wasn’t that lucky
though, he shoved him back toward our father, and he smacked her for
interrupting my lesson. David’s focus was back on me, this time he was like a
runaway train coming at me, “Angie!” I yelled for her to help. But she looked frozen,
and our father wasn’t going to let her try again. I dropped my bag so I could
free my hands to try to stop him, but instead I tripped backward and fell to
the floor, before David reached me, I was able to scramble back to my feet,
which was probably a bad move, because he grabbed hold of my shirt and pulled
me to him and he growled, “apologize.”
“I’m sorry. David, please.” He gave a laugh and shoved me
again, this time into the wall, my elbow hit first then the back of my head. I
knew he wouldn’t stop even if I didn’t fight back, so I did my best to ignore
the pounding in the back of my head. I put my hand out to try and stop him
again, but then I heard it… Dad was cheering him on, “That’s my boy! Teach her
a lesson.” I saw the spark brighten in David’s eyes with the encouragement and
as he swung his fist, I dodged trying to get to the door, maybe I could just
run and not look back. I looked toward the door, but with the second glance I
felt his hand connect with my cheek. I was on the ground again, not by the
knock on my head or the cheap shot he just gave my left cheek, but by pure
exhaustion. The more I fight the worse it will get, the less I fight I still
get beaten. David has tossed me like a ragdoll this time, with my sister being
stopped by our father, as our father cheers him on, while yelling “you can’t
win you good for nothing bitch.”
We were so close to escaping; we could have made it if we
didn’t try to get our mother to leave too. All for what? She’s not even helping
me; she hasn’t even come into investigate. I looked toward my sister, and I
could see she was scared for me. I looked at my father and he’s grinning like
he’s watching a comedy on tv and David, my once sweet brother, so lost and
desperate to please our father. I felt bad for us all, what went wrong to get us
to this point? I already know, I just didn’t want to admit it… I’m weak and I
try to please them all. I need to just worry about myself. With this in my
head, I take what energy I have left and run at David and before he even knows
what happened I shoulder check him and I sprint toward the door to freedom.
To learn more of Heather's story keep an eye out for Beyond the Willow. Heather tells Otis everything, but did she tell him in time? Or did he learn everything too late?
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