That’s How I Roll: A Novel (11 page)

ou’ve come this far, why not go the rest of the way? Make your own judgments of me. I know you won’t all decide the same. And I truly don’t care.

But
your
God … He just might.

rom the beginning, anyone could take just one look at me and know I was born bad.

Spina bifida. You get born with it. That’s why they call it “congenital,” because it comes right along with your body as it leaves the womb. That whole network of nerves which branch out from the end of your spine never gets fully developed.

I never got told those words. Doctors don’t talk to children around here; they only speak to parents. To the Beast, it was just “that spine thing.”

It’s a sorry world when a child has to look up his own disease in a book. I read everything I could find about it. When I came across speculation that there might be a genetic component involved, I let my eyes slide over those words.

I even learned there’s ways you can help prevent it—the woman who’s carrying the fetus can, I mean. Folic acid is best. You can make sure you have it in your diet, or even buy pills in one of those vitamin stores.

Not much brings a smile to my face, but the thought of Rory-Anne changing her diet so she could make healthier babies made me laugh inside.

What she should’ve done was have abortions. Probably would have, too. But she wasn’t allowed—the Beast wasn’t going to lose out on any of the money the government paid Rory-Anne to look after us.

ver since I can remember, I’ve been able to go away. Not walk away. And I sure couldn’t run. I mean, go away in my head. I saw things happen to Rory-Anne. I saw things happen to me. But it was all like watching some hideous horror movie—it terrified me, but I didn’t actually feel any of it.

It’s not that I can’t feel pain. All that spinal thing did was numb me up pretty good downstairs. But the Beast knew he could hurt me, and that was real important to him.

He’d punch me in my chest, backhand me across the mouth, stuff like that. But even though I could see the blood and the marks later on, I never felt anything while he was doing it to me. It was like I was floating above, watching it happen.

It wasn’t only the Beast. One time, Rory-Anne told me she was going to teach me to mind her. I didn’t know what she meant, but I could hear the evilness in her voice.

I watched her drag my chair over to the stove and hold my hand over the flame. It must have hurt—the skin on the back of my hand came right off—but I didn’t feel that, either.

When she saw what my hand looked like, Rory-Anne got scared. She picked me out of my chair and threw me in her car. All the way to the hospital, she warned me what she’d do to me if I told. I was to say I accidentally fell against the stove when my wheelchair skidded, and I couldn’t move away from the fire.

So that was the story I told. At the hospital, they made such a big fuss over me that I wished I could stay there forever. And I could see they didn’t want to turn me loose, either. Not because of the way they looked at me, because of the way they looked at Rory-Anne.

All that happened before Tory-boy came.

Tory-boy came and changed the world. My world, I mean.

ater, I learned how my life might have turned out different. When I was first born, Rory-Anne wouldn’t claim me. The way I understand it, when she was told about the spine thing and all the special care I’d need, she just walked right out of the hospital, leaving me there.

It took a while for the government people to locate Rory-Anne, so the people at the hospital had to name me themselves. By the time they carried me to where Rory-Anne lived with the Beast, my birth certificate read “Esau.”

Naturally, Rory-Anne had never told them who my father was. They had to put something down on the birth certificate, so they used Rory-Anne’s last name.

Branding me with the mark of the Beast.

Some folks thought the Beast was doing a charitable thing, keeping me home after Rory-Anne had tried to abandon me. But most knew better than that. They knew he’d found out that a baby born as crippled as I was could fetch even more government money than a common Welfare child.

Rory-Anne never got over hating me—never tired of telling me what an ugly, twisted thing I was. But Tory-boy was different. He was born so big and beautiful that the nurses said he looked like a little prince. They even took him in to show Rory-Anne, told her how lucky she was.

So Rory-Anne not only claimed her second child; she even named him after herself.

It wasn’t until a couple of years had passed that anyone knew Tory-boy was born as deeply cursed as me, only in a different way.

o matter how bad things ever got after Tory-boy came, I always managed to keep things in balance. Not the perfect balance I learned later on, but close enough so that we could get by.

“Getting by” is one of those sayings everybody uses. But those words mean different things to different people.

For me, they meant I had to keep me and Tory-boy alive until I could find a way to get us both out.

ory-boy never could understand complications. For him, having our own place, that was everything. He didn’t care what the furniture looked like, or if we had a big-screen TV or a microwave. Tory-boy never did covet things. But
feelings
, they were precious to him. And the most precious feeling of all was feeling safe.

What Tory-boy prized above everything on earth was the knowledge that nobody was going to wake him up in the middle of the night and start hurting him.

He probably thought that first little trailer of ours was magic. Oh, how he loved just hearing me say the words “our place.” I could see it on his face every time I said it. Like I was casting a spell to keep us safe.

After a while, he started saying it himself.

ory-boy wouldn’t ever be able to understand how all this had happened, how it started way before he was even born.

I never burdened his mind with what I knew. Letting him
believe in magic worked just as good. Better, really. There are things no child needs to know.

Magic soothed Tory-boy, just as logic did for me. I don’t remember the exact day, but I remember the feeling when it hit me, like an invisible lightning bolt striking deep inside my body.

From that moment on, I knew. It didn’t matter what road map you followed: magic and logic would take you to the same place.

Place, that was the key. It’s not the place you live in that keeps you safe; what keeps you safe is your place in the world.

nderstanding how something works isn’t enough. If you want to master it, be in complete control, first you have to take it apart … all the way down to its smallest component. Then you examine each separate piece to learn how they all fit together to form a functioning unit.