Who Owns Kelly Paddik (6 page)

“See you later,” Fran said as we passed them.

They must be going to the hospital
, I thought.

When we got back to the unit, Chris and I went into my room. I flopped onto my bed and stared at the ceiling. Chris sat on the floor, her back against the wall. I couldn't believe that Pit Bull had slashed her arm. Even if she'd surprised me by crying, I still couldn't believe she would slash her arm. If there was anyone in this unit who had everything under control, it was Pit Bull. She controlled everything and everyone within breathing distance. But slashing meant you'd lost it — you were out of control. Believe me, I knew that. It was only a few days now until my stitches were supposed to come out.

“I can't believe she did that,” I said.

“Why not?” asked Chris.

“She's always so tough,” I said. “She laughed when she saw my arm.” I looked at Chris. “You ever slash?” I asked her.

Chris rubbed her forehead. “I thought about it a couple of times. But I guess Fran changed my mind.”

“How'd she do that?” I asked.

“Well, she knows about what my father did to me.” Chris's face got very pale and twisted
around when she said this. “He ... sexually abused me. I don't really like to talk about it. I still get nightmares sometimes. I did a lot of dumb junk to forget.”

“The usual?” I asked. I knew what that meant — drugs, drinking, AWOLs, hooking.

Chris kept twisting her hands. “Some-times ... well, I still can't forget and I get hyper.” I thought she might start to cry, but she swallowed and went on. “They put me in a group home because I kept running away. As long as I saw an open door, I was out and gone. I know my dad wasn't hurting me anymore. All that ... sexual abuse ... was over, but I kept thinking about it. I'd think about it every time I had to stay in one place. I had to keep moving. I just looked for an open door and took off.”

I was watching her face closely. It was like hearing my own story, except that my dad died in a car crash a few years ago. I thought I'd be rid of him then, but he was still here, hanging around inside my head.

Chris sighed. “I kept taking off until they put me in here. Then I couldn't run anymore.” She started scratching the back of her hand — not deep, just nervous. I knew what that meant — not
scared enough to slash, but thinking about it. “Y'know how when you run,” Chris said, “you feel like you're getting out ... I dunno ... of the mess inside you?”

I nodded.

“That's why I always ran,” she said. “But with these walls, there's no place to go. I did a lot of kicking and yelling when I first got here. Then Fran told me that it was really my dad who was doing the kicking and yelling. He wanted to hurt me, and I was still letting him do that to me.”

She must say that to everyone
, I thought.

“Well, I thought about it and I figured she was right,” Chris said. “Why should I wreck my life? If I worked it all out and did okay, he'd be more surprised than anybody.”

“So what did you do?” I asked. “You seem okay now.”

“Well, this sounds stupid,” Chris said, “but I just talked about it. I talked to Fran and then to Jim. A lot of kids talk to them. Jim's heard a lot of that stuff. He listens and asks questions. Someday I'm going to be a social worker like Jim, but up in Churchill.”

Slowly I pulled up my sleeve and looked
at the stitches on my arm. “I thought this would be the end of it all, y'know?” I said.

“Guess you're stuck with being alive longer than you thought,” Chris said softly.

“I guess,” I muttered. I thought about Pit Bull, her arm wrapped in a tea towel, not looking at us. I didn't want to turn out like her. But the idea of talking to Jim scared me. What if talking about my dad made him show up in my head again?

“You should give the key back,” Chris said suddenly.

A wave of shock washed over me. I glanced quickly at Chris, then away, so she wouldn't see the surprise in my eyes. “I don't have any keys,” I said.

“Yes, you do,” Chris said.

“Yeah?” I demanded. “Where are they?”

Chris pulled the set of keys I'd thrown into the washroom garbage out of her pocket. “Guess where I found these,” she said. “But the master key is gone. You've got it.”

“Prove it.” I sat up, my heart pounding. I had to keep that key. It was my only chance to get out of this place.

Chris just sat there and looked at me,
swinging the keys around her finger.

“What are you going to do with those, Chris?” I asked.

She looked at the keys for a moment. “Oh, I might say that I found them at school in the gym,” she said. “Or I might say that I found them in the garbage in the washroom in the unit. I haven't made up my mind. What are you going to do with your key?”

Lie after lie floated through my head, but I decided to say nothing. “This doesn't have anything to do with me,” I said, turning my back. “You do what you want, Chris. Just leave me out of it, okay?”

That night I lay in bed, pinching myself to stay awake. I was wearing sweats over my pajamas, and I felt thick and lumpy. After that talk with Chris, I figured I had to make my break right away. The staff who worked nights always stayed awake, but sometimes they left the unit. And for some reason the extra staff who'd worked last night was gone. I listened to the night staff moving around. When I heard her leave the unit, I peered through my doorway. There was no one
in sight — the staff must be checking on Pit Bull in the back room.

I slid the key out of the folded section of the poster. Then I snuck through the unit and out the back door. The stairway was very dark, lit only by EXIT signs. At the bottom of the stairs I dropped the key. It hit my foot so there wasn't much noise, but I had to get down on my knees to find it.

My body felt full of strange whispering voices, and I kept looking over my shoulder. It felt as if someone was coming down the stairs towards me, someone I couldn't hear but I knew he was there.
Come on, come on
, hissed a voice in my head.
You've got to get away or you know what will happen
.

Finally my hand bumped against the key. I grabbed it, stood up and tried to fit it into the lock. I was so nervous that it took a couple of tries to get it into the keyhole. That feeling of someone coming towards me was growing, as if he was right behind me.

After what seemed like forever, I felt the key slide into the lock. I tried to turn it, but the key wouldn't move. I tried again, jamming it hard. The key still didn't move. I knew this was
the right key — I'd watched so many staff lock and unlock doors with it.

Then it hit me — they'd changed the locks. I'd waited too long, and now there was nowhere to run. In the dark, with all those EXIT signs around me, I backed against the door. I knew who was coming for me — someone bigger than real life, scarier. Suddenly my dad was there again, in the dark all around me. I couldn't move. I was gripping the key so tightly it cut into my hand.

I can't do this alone
, I thought.
He's bigger than me
.

After a long time under the EXIT sign I climbed back up the stairs. I waited until I saw the night staff go into the washroom. Then I climbed into bed and slipped the key under my pillow.

The next afternoon, Chris pulled on her jacket and left to go on her big twenty-minute walk. I sat in the kitchen, playing cards and watching the clock. Some of the girls held a countdown. Even I wasn't sure if she would come back. And the strange thing was that I wanted her to — I wanted to believe that she meant what she said. I wanted to believe someone could straighten out in here.

She was a few minutes late, but that was
because a staff had to go down to let her in. Chris came over to my table, trying to ignore the fact that everyone was staring at her.

“Weather's nice out today,” she grinned.

“We can see out the window,” snapped Pit Bull. She was back from the hospital, sitting in front of the TV, her bandaged arm across her stomach. We ignored her. Chris said that she'd gone to the McDonald's at the corner and ordered a Sprite.

“Why'd you come back?” someone asked.

“I don't want to get out of here for a couple of days.” Chris sounded scornful. “When I go, I'm leaving here for good.” Fran walked by and Chris added loudly, with a grin, “Just so none of these staff can ever bug me again.”

“Ever sick, Chris,” Fran winked.

The next day I asked to see Jim. I was pretty nervous walking into his office. I felt as if he already knew everything that I was going to tell him — as if he could read my mind. I laid Sister Mary's key on his desk. “I tried this and it didn't work,” I said. “When did you change the locks?”

He looked surprised, which made me feel better. I didn't know how to get started, so I said that Chris's story about her dad sounded a lot like
mine. This was hard to say. Even that little bit made me think I saw my dad out of the corner of my eye. But I had to keep going. I held onto the arms of my chair to help myself remember where I was.
It's over
, I thought.
It's not happening now
. Sometimes I could feel myself crying, and I stared out of the office window while I talked.

I didn't tell Jim everything that day, but it was a start. He did ask some pretty good questions. Sometimes they made me remember things I didn't want to think about. If they hit too close, I didn't answer them. Not yet.

“Would you like to tell your mother how angry you are at her?” asked Jim. He said he knew that my mom hadn't tried to stop the abuse. Just as I'd thought, he already knew my secret. But not because he could read my mind — my mom had told him.

“She won't listen,” I said. “She never listened to me before.”

“Your mother has been seeing a counselor for a year now,” Jim told me. “She's been working pretty hard. Why don't you try to talk to her? I'll be here with you.”

“I'll think about it,” I said.

I did think about it — all afternoon and evening. Before I went to bed I asked Fran to let Jim know that I'd decided to talk to my mom. Then I knocked on Chris's door. She was sitting on her bed, reading a comic and chewing on a pen. There were ink marks all over her face. I was pretty sure she didn't know that they were there.

“I just wanted to tell you that I gave Jim the key,” I said.

“Yeah?” She grinned. There was ink on her teeth.

“Yeah,” I said. “I talked to him today. He's okay.”

“I dropped the key ring on the gym teacher's desk,” Chris said. “I heard her tell someone she found it.”

I nodded. “Thanks for trying to cover for me, but they know I took them now.”

“Okay.” She shrugged and grinned.

“Do you know you have ink all over your face?” I asked.

“Do I?” Chris shrieked and ran for the washroom.

Wednesday after school I sat in Jim's office
scratching softly at my arms. Jim was talking about something, but I could hardly listen. There came a knock on the door. My mom walked in.

“Hello, Mrs. Paddik,” Jim said, standing up.

I felt a huge hole open in my stomach. I hadn't seen my mom for four years. There was a lot of gray in her hair and new lines in her face. For a second I wanted to touch her, just to make sure she was real.

“Hello, Kelly.” She sat down slowly in the chair next to me.

“Hi.” I looked away. What was I supposed to say to her?

Somehow Jim got us talking. What really surprised me was that my mom listened to most of what I said, even when I yelled. A few times I saw tears in her eyes, and then I had to stop. Crying really gets to me, I guess. Even when I still thought that I hated my mom, I didn't want to make her cry.

She said she was sorry and that it was her fault that I was in trouble. “It's because I've been seeing a counselor that I can say these things to you,” she told me. “Before, I knew you were right, but I felt too guilty. Your father ... hurt me
too, and that's why I wasn't able to help you.”

Well, I knew what it was like to hurt too much to care about anyone else. I nodded. Then she told me that Jolyn and Danny were doing okay and living with her.

I could tell Jim was pretty pleased with our meeting. He invited my mom to come back the next day for Parents' Night. I couldn't believe my mom had said what she'd said. And I couldn't believe some of the things that I'd yelled at her — or that she'd listened.

It was as if all those things that I'd never talked about had taken up space inside me, swelling up when I got angry. But as I talked to my mom, the memories started to leave me through my mouth. I still remembered what happened, but now it felt like for the first time the memories were outside my body, leaving space inside for me. I felt as if I could be more than what my dad had done to me. I didn't know what that was, but I sure wanted to find out.

Later that day I sat in my room, looking at the poster Sister Mary had given me. Standing up, I went over and folded the words back out so that I could see them. LOVE YOURSELF. Ideas for stories floated slowly through my head.
Love yourself
, I wrote on a piece of paper. Then I wrote,
Love who? Who are you? Kelly. Who is Kelly? Who owns Kelly Paddik?

I thought a minute. Then I wrote,
I want to
.

A little later I went out to play cards with Chris, but she was out on another one of her walks. This time, though, I wasn't worried. I finally understood why she was going to come back.

Months later I sat in that same bedroom, staring out of the same window. The yellow leaves were gone and the tree branches were lined with snow and ice. For four months I'd been talking to Jim, Fran and my mom. Believe me, it was a lot better than talking to my pet rock. My mom brought Jolyn and Danny to visit me every Sunday, and we talked lots on the phone. In a couple of weeks I would be starting home visits on weekends. Then in the summer, if everything
went well, I would get to move back home.