Three Little Words (5 page)

Lena Jamison led us onto the plane. I was so upset, I was shivering, so she wrapped her sweater around me. “I didn’t know you were afraid of flying,” she said, completely misunderstanding me.

She folded her hands across a manila envelope in her lap. “What’s in there?” I asked.

“Your papers.”

“Does it say where we’re going?”

“No.”

“Are we going back to the Paces’ house?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why can’t we stay with Adele?”

Ms. Jamison puffed out with annoyance. “Honey, we need to keep you safe.”

Again, she missed the point. Adele had fussed over us even more than our mother had. She gave us more attention, food, and affection than anyone ever had. It seemed logical to me that Luke and I would be safest with someone who actually loved us.

When we arrived in Florida, Luke and I went our separate ways—he ended up at another congested baby farm, while I “lucked out” and got to be the only child in the home of Boris and Doreen Potts, an older couple who lived in a double-wide mobile home surrounded by a chain-link fence that seemed to buckle into itself like a Slinky. The strawberries in the field next door smelled so ripe that I would press my nose through a diamond of wire to sniff the fragrant fruit.

The Pottses had a revolving wash line in the backyard that I enjoyed spinning when it was empty. I often sat in the shade of their tangerine tree and played with my dolls. I had my own room, and I folded my Precious Moments sleeping bag at the end of the bed. Sometimes they would leave gifts on my sleeping bag, like a pair of jelly sandals with silver sparkles that I thought were the greatest shoes I ever had.

Mr. Potts barely talked to me, but I was always questioning him. When he dumped ketchup on his eggs, I asked, “Why are you doing that?”

“I like it that way.”

I wrinkled my nose. “That’s disgusting!”

“It isn’t polite to comment on someone else’s food,” Mrs. Potts chided.

Mostly, though, Mrs. Potts liked me because I entertained myself.

“Could you turn the sprinkler on?” I asked on a blistering summer day.

“It’s going to rain,” Mrs. Potts said, but then she relented because she knew it would keep me amused for a while.

I put on my bathing suit and jumped around as it sprayed back and forth. A dark cloud hovered nearby, but I kept playing until I was forced to stop. I felt rain on my shoulders and looked up to see if I would be called inside. The sun still baked the yard near the driveway, but it was pouring near the house. I skipped between the wet and the dry side of the yard a few times, calling for Mrs. Potts. “Come and see the miracle!”

She said, “If it rains when the sun is out, it means that the devil’s beating his wife.” This scared me, so I came inside.

After dinner I would sit on the porch swing and wait for the first star so I could make my eternal wish: to be with my mother. My yearning was like an insect bite. If I left it alone, I would stop noticing it; but if I focused on it, it would drive me crazy. I had sucked on my fingers as a baby, so when something bothered me, they still fluttered into my mouth. The more anxious I was, the more intensely I gnawed on my fingernails, sometimes making my fingers bleed. Then I could concentrate on that rather than the feelings inside.

I could not help worrying about Luke. He lived only about twenty minutes away, but we rarely saw each other. His foster parents had a three-bedroom mobile home on a property that also had a plant nursery. On one visit there were eight foster kids, and my brother shared a room with five other boys.

“We have more room at our house. Why can’t he come and live with us?” I asked Mrs. Potts.

“That’s not my decision.” She closed off all further discussion on the matter.

My favorite activity was watching a television that I did not have to share with other children who hogged the remote control. I would get up early and flip to
Care Bears
or
Adventures in Wonderland.
I wished I could go through the looking glass so I could find my mother.

Then there was the video.

The last time I had watched a movie, it had been a Disney tape, so I pressed the play button on the Pottses’ VCR remote. This was not a cartoon, but I could tell it had something to do with history. Thinking it was educational, I curled up in Mr. Potts’s chair. A female Nazi commandant was torturing some of the prettier female prisoners with electric dildos because she was jealous of them. I knew I should turn it off, but I kept hoping that the good guys would prevail so I wouldn’t have to go to bed with the frightening images etched in my mind. I shuddered as the story became even more gruesome. The commandant forced guys to make love to her, and she castrated those who did not satisfy her insatiable lust. An American prisoner was the only one who was able to pleasure her, so she spared him. In other frightening scenes she tortured women sexually and drunken German men doused women with beer and then raped them.

I wished that one of the Pottses would catch me so I would not have to watch it until the end, but they had gone to bed and left me on my own. The worst scene in the movie came when the commandant gave a dinner party. A woman was ordered to stand on a block of ice with a noose around her neck. By the end of the meal the ice had melted and she had hanged herself.

For years scenes from that movie have haunted me, and the images still bubble to the surface whenever I remember my time at the Pottses’ house. I eventually learned the name of the movie,
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS
, and I learned something else, too: Mr. Potts had been accused of molesting children.

I saw that movie only a few weeks before I entered first grade. Walden Lake Elementary was the most beautiful school I had ever seen; it even had a fountain in the courtyard. My only friend in the neighborhood was an older boy named Fernando. He promised he would not let anyone harass me on the school bus, which I appreciated until he showed me a knife he had hidden in his backpack. I was afraid we both would get in trouble. I liked some of the girls in my class, but—without any preparation—I was moved from the Pottses’ foster home to live with Irma and Clifford Hagen in October. I already knew Mrs. Hagen because she was Mr. and Mrs. Potts’s daughter, but I begged to stay where I was because I did not want to leave my new school friends.

“You’ll be happier living with other girls,” Mrs. Potts insisted.

“Can’t I go to Luke’s house?”

“They don’t have enough beds for the ones they have.”

I knew it was hopeless to ask about my mother or Adele. I flung my arms around Mrs. Potts’s waist and looked up pleadingly. “Please, can’t I just stay?”

“They
won’t let you,” she sputtered angrily. Something had happened, but I would not find out until much later why they took me away.

According to my tally, Mrs. Hagen was my eighth so-called mother in three and a half years. To cope, I pretended I was destined for a different life, just like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Princess and, of course, Alice. I had only to fit in the shoe, be kissed by the prince, come into my rightful inheritance, or find some other through-the-looking-glass way out of foster care, and I’d enter the life I was meant to live. Each time I moved, I cheered myself with a little rhyme:
Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho! Down the rabbit hole to another place I go!
I always believed that my happily ever after with my real mother was just over the next horizon.

To my annoyance, the Hagens asked me to call them “Mom” and “Dad” right away, but I resisted. Adele had drilled into me the correctness of addressing my elders as “sir” and “ma’am,” so I could pretty easily say “ma’am,” which sounded close enough to “Mom” and sounded respectful enough to satisfy Mrs. Hagen. Plus, the Hagens were suckers for my stare into space. As long as I pretended to listen and said I was sorry for any infractions, I got off without much punishment. The important thing, I had learned by now, was not to get on a foster parent’s bad side, because certain incidents trailed you like dog poop on your shoes.

The Hagens lived in the nicest home I had been in so far. There were four bedrooms, two baths, and a breezy family room. In the back there was an inground pool and a combination basketball and tennis court. Even though there were nine people in the house, it did not seem crowded. The Hagens’ daughter, who was around seventeen, had her own bedroom, while the six foster girls (the five others ranged in age from ten to fourteen), shared two bedrooms. I unfolded my Precious Moments sleeping bag, arranged Katie and Lilly on the shelf, put my jelly sandals in the closet, and tested my new bed, which smelled mustier than the sunshine-dried sheets that had flapped on Mrs. Potts’s line.

I did like having others to play with and enjoyed girly activities, like having my nails polished or my hair done and dressing up like a princess. My imaginary prince’s name was Jonathan Rodriquez. He looked like a grown Fernando and he wore a blue uniform trimmed with gold braid. Someday he would whisk me to his kingdom, where I would be safe forever.

My new school, Seffner Elementary, was overcrowded. My teacher’s name was Ms. Port, which I thought was a funny coincidence since her classroom was in a portable trailer.

The day I started there, Mrs. Hagen dropped me off and said, “You’ll have to find your own way from now on, so remember where your classroom is.”

“I will!” I said in my most chipper voice. When I looked back, she had disappeared. Other children were hugging their parents good-bye, but I was alone. My fingers flew to my mouth, and I bit off my thumbnail as I forced myself up the first metal step, then the next.

“You must be Ashley Rhodes.” Ms. Port greeted me with a wide smile. As a way to welcome me to the classroom, she asked the students to make new name tags for our desks. “You can write your name any way you want,” she told me. I drew my name in bubble letters. When we finished, we each stood to show off our artwork and say our names. When the other students saw my creation, they clapped.

I loved school, but I was envious of the children whose parents walked them to the classroom door in the morning and were waiting outside when the bell rang each afternoon. Like the older girls in the foster home, I rode my bike to school. Pedaling uphill on Kingsway Road during the morning rush hour could be scary because so many cars were passing me, but the downhill ride was exhilarating.

On class picture day I chose my fanciest dress with a hoop skirt. When I got on my bike, I sat on the wire to keep the skirt from tangling in the greasy chain, but then the front popped up and I could not see over the top. Even worse, my panties were exposed. If I sat on the front of the dress, my butt hung out in the breeze. I was so frustrated that I had to walk the bike. I got grease stains on the hem and arrived after the bell.