As a little girl there wasn't much for me to do with my life. During a very difficult period where Mom had gotten mad at Grandpa and Grandma and had moved us out into the middle of nowhere into a little, run-down trailer that was low rent and low everything else, I found myself quite alone in the world. I was five years old going on six, and Aurora's caretaker at night. Mom was working at the bar at night and sleeping in during the morning. She didn't tell anyone there was no sitter. At night she would put us into bed, and all we knew was when we woke up she was home. Once or twice I awoke to find her gone, but I had grown accustomed to her absences so I went to the bathroom or got some water on my own before heading back to bed. Every now and then Aurora would cry, would scream for our mom, but I was always there to calm her, to get her to go back to sleep.
In the mornings Mom would get ready for bed by locking herself in her room, with Aurora in her playpen watching the finest shows PBS had to offer. And she left me in the living room with strict instructions to stay put and to not open the door to anyone. While my mother slept and while my sister grew increasingly educated by watching television in the bedroom, I broke the rules by going outside to explore. We lived in the middle of nowhere; the nearest house to us was a quarter of a mile away. And each day I would become a little braver by wandering to the back yard, past the back yard to a little, secluded area in the woods behind our house.
It was very idyllic in my little haven. There was a large tree for shade and below that there was a patch of green moss that jutted out beside a small pond. I would often take a book or some chips and a juice packet and hide away there, pretending I was sitting at the banks of a major ocean watching for a redheaded mermaid to surface, or waiting for Alice to crawl through the rabbit hole to join me in Wonderland. After a while, other peoples' notions began to bore me, so I came up with my own world. And in that new creation I stowed all the hopes and dreams a little mind like mine could hold.
It was a world that had a beautiful shoreline where children could play all day. There was an amusement park in the distance that went on for a mile, filled with roller coasters and ferris wheels and any sort of sweet treat a little girl could ever want. And far beyond the shore and the amusement park, high atop a snow-capped mountain was a beautiful palace that was made of iridescent blue glass. And when the sun was high in the sky it would hit the cerulean walls, and an entire swath of my secret land would be bathed in a beautiful blue light. Sometimes I would just stand in the blue light, wondering what it looked like from the dizzying heights. One day I hoped to find out. But for now the confines of my play land more than sufficed. I guess it never occurred to me that I deserved to see the view from the top of that dizzying elevation. Or maybe I just felt safer on solid ground and not advancing toward the unknown. Maybe I just didn't know enough about mountains and castles at the age of six to get that far with my imagination. I'm not sure why I preferred my little refuge I created in the real refuge of the woods, but something about the castle filled me with both awe and abject terror.
I originally named my imaginary world Dream Land, because up until then it was hard for me to find my dreams anywhere else. My mom had Aurora, Aurora had my mom. I honestly had nobody, not even Grandpa and Grandma at this point, so I created people to depend on. I would sneak out over the summer months and stay all day, being very careful to sneak back according to the sun's position. My mother usually woke up around the time the sun got to the middle of the sky, so that was my cue to head back. Sometimes I cut it pretty close, stepping inside the door with just moments to spare before I heard my mom's lumbering footsteps in the hallway, the unskilled pattering of my sister's footsteps right behind her. We spent three years in that trailer, during which time I renamed my world Psitharis. It came from the word "thesaurus", a word I grew fascinated with during a first-grade English lesson, only switched around a bit so my fantasy world seemed more grown up. So the world itself was called Psitharis, and my park got to remain Dream Land. I spent every moment I could in my land of splendor and overabundant happiness. And the more I visited this world, the more vivid it became, almost to the point where I couldn't tell where reality ended and Psitharis began.
One day while wandering through the crowds of Dream Land, the strangest thing happened to me. I bumped into a little boy my age, maybe a year younger. More like I got tackled; he was running my way and I had no chance to dodge him. We both went flying, he went one way and I went the other. Usually in Psitharis if I encountered another being they were very polite and accommodating. This boy was anything but.
"Hey, watch it!" the boy yelled, getting to his feet and swiping the dirt from his bottom. I was still sitting on the ground, clutching my forehead. Apparently his head was much harder than mine, because when we collided our foreheads cracked together like an egg against a stone.
"You should say 'excuse me'!" I replied, incensed. That's when I noticed he hadn't fared so well with his head either. "Oh my gosh." I exclaimed. "You're bleeding!" He reached up and touched his skull. There was a tiny trickle of blood that was growing in both length and density. His fingers were covered in blood when he pulled them away. The look of terror on his face turned my indignation at his lack of manners into sympathy. "Let me help you." I said, still nursing the goose egg on my head. "You're hurt."
"No more than you." he replied, looking at whatever was forming on my own head. "I'll fix it later. I'm already late and the boss is going to beat me!" He pulled me to my feet, and in return I handed him the paper towel I had brought with me from the sandwich I had eaten earlier in the real world. He took it, marveled at it for a moment, while I motioned for him to put it to his wound. He wiped the trail of blood from his face as best he could, and before I could even utter a "goodbye" he was off like a shot. It was the oddest encounter I had ever had in my imaginary world. It was also the very first time something in Psitharis has actually hurt me. I stood there, half astonished, half concerned. How did this boy manage to physically hurt me? After all, even as a child I knew he wasn't real. But here I was, nursing a lump on my head and marveling at my little creation that had suddenly turned against me.
If he hadn't just rammed me in the head and caused me a severe headache, I would have said he was the first boy I thought of as "cute." Everything, down to his light brown hair and his amazing sea-blue eyes were just astounding, almost ethereal. He was exactly what I would have fashioned as the perfect boy, if I didn't think boys were terminally gross and disgusting. As I headed back to the trailer after my day in Dream Land was over, I still felt a pain above my eyes. The goose egg had not gone away, even after I stopped pretending. I figured I must have run into a tree as I was daydreaming and not noticed it. I headed home, cooking up a long excuse involving a lost battle with a toy that fell from a high shelf in the closet to explain away the bump. And I never saw him again in the year that followed, though sometimes I wish I had.
The day I lost Psitharis was the most traumatic day of my young life. I had waited just a moment too long, had played in the sand and wandered through the crowds and the happy children just a little too late. The sound of my name being called out by my incensed mother brought me back to earth. I sprinted out of the woods as quickly as I could, but my mother was already halfway there. Her face was purple with anger and rage. It wasn't the fact I had worried her and I knew it. I had disobeyed her, I had put her in a situation where she might get in trouble. And the punishment would be severe. But I never could have imagined what she would do in her violent rage.
She jerked me up off my feet; we could both hear a SNAP as she pulled me violently upward. Instantly I started screaming in pain. My mom, her anger suddenly abated, uttered "Oh shit!" before dropping me on the ground and screaming at me. "Why did you have to do that? Oh no! Oh no! They're going to take Aurora away from me if they find out!" She left me standing there, bawling my head off and holding my arm as if it were going to detach. She grabbed Aurora, who had followed behind her like the shadow she had always been, and ran into the house. Ten minutes later my grandfather pulled up in the driveway. He found me just where she had left me, standing in the back yard, arm limp and hurting so badly I had cried until my eyes were swollen shut.
"Dear Lord, Olivia!" he exclaimed when he caught sight of me. "What did you do to this poor child!" My mom was squeezing the life out of Aurora, crying so much her answer was almost incoherent. "She started it! She ran out of the house! I didn't know where she was!" He scooped me up, ignored my mother's pleas of "Please don't tell! Please don't tell!" and placed me gently in his pick-up. The ride was a blur, experienced through eyes too swollen to tell which way were going. Twenty minutes later Grandpa rushed me through the double doors of the emergency room. Forty minutes later we were led into one of the examination rooms. Before the doctor could come I did some pleading of my own. "Grandpa, please don't tell them Mommy did it. I did something bad. I shouldn't have left the house. She was looking for me and I wasn't there."
"But sweetie, where was your mama before you left the house? How come she didn't notice you gone in the first place?" He asked.
I looked down at my shoes, afraid to tell him. I figure there was no point hiding the truth. "Mama was in bed." I answered. My grandfather swore, one of the only times I ever heard him use a bad word. "She works late and she gets tired. Aurora stays with her and I'm supposed to stay in the living room."
Grandpa was not happy. "Do you mean to tell me that your mama leaves you all alone during the day while she sleeps?" I nodded. He started pacing around the room. He was mumbling things I'm sure I wasn't meant to hear. Finally, he stopped pacing and faced me. "All right sweetie. I won't tell them. As much as I want to beat the living tar out of your mama right now I think what we need to worry about at the moment is you and your sister. And I can't do that very proper if you two are stuck in a foster home, can I?"
All I knew about foster homes was I'd be taken away from my grandma and grandpa, and that scared me. I'd never see my little sister again, who I really liked despite her being a royal pain. And I'd never see my Psitharis again. That thought frightened me worst of all. As for Mama, well I think that day I decided I could pretty much take or leave her.
The doctor put me in a bright blue cast. He said most girls chose pink but the blue reminded me of the castle's light reflected from the sun. When asked how this happened, I told him I was trying to climb a tree but I fell from a low branch and came down on it pretty hard. I'm not sure he believed me, since he and my grandfather stepped out of the room for a moment or two after he asked. If my granddad told him anything it didn't make any difference. No evil women in starched black suits came to collect me; no police officers came knocking on the exam room door. And as we headed back home that evening, I felt safe and calm, even though my arm was still very sore. It didn't matter; I was returning to my home, my Psitharis.
When we pulled up in the driveway it was already getting dark. My mother was standing outside, Aurora perched on her hip. But something seemed to be off. I looked down at her feet and saw a small suitcase. I could feel my heart begin to pound in my ears as I began to panic. What was going on here?
"Okay, here's what's going to happen." My grandfather started, stepping out of his truck. "We're going to take Medora for the rest of the summer. Aurora will be staying with us while you work and while you are home asleep. You can't leave these babies alone anymore. We'll be keeping a close eye on Aurora making sure she looks well fed and clean in our absence. Medora won't be coming home until school starts back up. If you do anything, and I mean anything that makes us doubt you, we'll tell them what really happened in that back yard. Is that clear?"
My mother stuck her lip out and gave my grandfather her "I hate you" look, but she nodded. Her eyes were still red from crying. Even at the age of nine I knew she didn't cry out of any sense of remorse for what she had done to me. My grandfather reached for my bag and I started to panic. What about Psitharis? Would I get to see it again? When was I coming back? Would I forget about my beloved city before I returned? Perhaps I could will it to follow me to y grandparents' back yard. It was the only shred of hope I had to cling to.
My grandparents settled me into Aunt Charlotte's old room, because it was the only one that still looked like a girl's room. Mom's old room had been changed into a storage closet for all of the things my mother had collected and stored over the years at their house. I spent that first night petrified out of my little mind. How would I manage without Psitharis? What if I couldn't get it to come to this new place? What was I going to do without it? I dreamt about Psitharis, only I dreamt a great fence had been built around it, and I was standing on the shore pulling at the gates, begging them to let me in. But nobody came. In that moment I knew Psitharis was lost to me. Nobody answered my screams, except Grandpa, dutifully sitting by my bedside. "There, there, my girl. Everything's going to be all right." I hugged him as if he was the only thing that could stop the downward spiral my short life had become. He rocked me until I fell asleep in his arms. And when I woke up again and again he was there. And I felt for the first time in my life like I was loved. I loved being his "my girl" more than anything. But it didn't take away the gut-wrenching pain of losing the world that had kept me alive for the last three years.
The next evening, true to her word, my mother pulled up in her old rattling car, took Aurora out of the car seat and, without a word, drove away. And for a week it went this way. Mom stopped, took Aurora out of the car, didn't look at me, barely talked to Grandma and Grandpa, and drove away. It was beginning to become routine, and it was more than enough of my mother's presence for me. And then, one afternoon, when my mother was due to pick my sister up for the afternoon, she didn't show. An hour passed; then two, then three. Grandma called the hospitals, frantic. Grandpa drove by the bar where she worked; the owner said she had quit the night before and had taken her paycheck and left. He went by the trailer, which was missing all of her clothes and her suitcases and left wide open. It was obvious she had abandoned the place. My granddad took a garbage bag, packed up as many clothes as he could find either clean in a drawer or dirty on the floor and took a separate bag and packed up some of our toys and put my music boxes in a box. Then he shut the door of the trailer behind him, basically shutting the door on his prodigal daughter.
He didn't tell us about mama right away. He and Grandma thought it best to just tell us she had gone off to get a better place to live. Imagine their surprise when for the first time I cried out for the old ratty home and my old miserable life. They were amazed I missed her so much. The truth was I didn't miss her a bit. I was so glad she was gone. My life had gotten so much better since she disappeared. There was only one thing I left at that trailer that I grieved for and it certainly wasn't her. Psitharis was truly gone, never to return.
The funny but positive aftermath of my mom's exodus was the relationship I finally created with my little sister. Up until that point we had been separated by a bedroom wall for the biggest part of our lives. Even after Aurora had turned four and had outgrown her playpen, my mother refused to trust her seven-year-old daughter with her care. I can't imagine how boring her life must have been sitting in that quiet room for hours, with only the television to keep her company. These days the only time I saw her was when Mom drove us to and from school when it was in session. We hardly spoke to each other because we didn't know each other. Now here we were, nine and six, free and out in the open, playing in Grandma's back yard, running around screaming like maniacs. We celebrated my tenth birthday together in the spring, blowing out the candles on the cake Grandma had so lovingly made for me.
There was another couple at the birthday party, an older couple like my grandparents. They were introduced to me as Mr. and Mrs. Lange, and I remember feeling rather uneasy I felt them continually staring at me, the lady actually tearing up as I ripped open the gift they brought along with them. It was a music box, like the ones I got in the mail every year. The man named Martin took it out of the extraneous packaging, handing it to me, touching the top of my head with his free hand as he did. It was a hummingbird in a cage, and as the music played the bird bounced up and down on his perch. It was one of the best gifts I had ever gotten. I embraced the music box and, in an act that was completely contrary of my distrusting and abused nature, jumped up and hugged them both. The lady started crying, which frightened me because I thought I had done something wrong, and she and her husband disappeared soon after while I was proudly showing off my musical bird cage to my aunt. I saw them several times after that, never knowing who they truly were until they were eventually and unceremoniously kicked out of my life for good. No one ever told me they were my other grandparents until it was too late. Another missed chance at happiness, courtesy of Olivia Parker. Even so, everything was so wonderful in my life. I had two grandparents who adored me, a little sister who hung on my every word and all thoughts of Psitharis were becoming distant enough to be pleasant memories instead of painful reminders. But two years later, when our mother showed up at our grandparents' house in the middle of the night, we slept through one of the biggest fights Rogers Street had ever experienced.
It seemed she had gone off, met a man who put her through community college, then dumped him for the attorney she worked for as a paralegal. The attorney had helped her get her child abuse charges reduced to the point where she was charged with little more than disturbing the peace, and she was ready and willing to take us back and start a new life with her daughters. The attorney, who was unhappily married and certain to get a divorce just any day now, was ready for the two-story home and the white picket fence, and all she needed to complete the picture was her children. Naturally my grandparents balked at the idea of her returning after two years of abandonment to pretend like nothing had ever happened, just for the sake of having collateral to dupe yet another man into falling for her delusions of joy and serenity. They brought her very long list of sins against us, including cutting me off from the other half of me, my father and his family. They told her how they had reunited us, and how Martin and Joyce Lange were arranging to have their son fly back to North Carolina to meet me for the first time in my life. Thus began the screaming match of the century.
That's the first time she threatened to smash my music boxes to pieces, she claimed if he wanted me badly enough he would have already come to get me, but he didn't. Nobody wanted me, especially not two old people who had never wanted her. But she wanted me, wanted us both and she would get us, no matter what. And two weeks later that's exactly what happened. The lawyer buttered up a judge friend of his to expedite the process, sparing my mom any stress that would have come with a lengthy court battle, not to mention a reunion with Jack Lange. And once again Aurora and I were off to parts unknown.
I kept telling myself there was a reason to be happy, because soon I would be back in that ratty old trailer, where my Psitharis was patiently waiting. It had been such a long time since I had seen it I was forgetting how beautiful the blue light was reflected off the castle, how lively and vibrant all the people were and how nice they had been to me. I wanted to return, to experience that sort of happiness again, the kind of bliss I couldn't get from loving grandparents or my newfound love for my sister. I wanted to remember.
But we never went back to the trailer. After an eternity of driving we pulled up to a nice development filled with condominiums. At the end of the street was our new home, 742 Conover Drive. The inside was tastefully decorated, mostly in furniture the attorney had helped my mother pick out. Our shared bedroom was cute; two pink canopied beds and music boxes in every corner. My dad's music boxes. The only thing he had ever given me, and she was using them as proof to any visiting social workers that she loved and adored us, and would never return to the darkness of two years ago. She thought we would be happy; instead we both burst into tears. Poor Olivia was stuck with two screaming, crying children who didn't know her and wanted to go home. She was in essence our abductor, and we hated her for it.
Eventually we adjusted to our new lives. Surprisingly to everyone involved my mother actually took the judge's advice and allowed my grandparents liberal visitation. Actually she used them as a babysitting service. After all, the attorney still hadn't decided on what to do in his marriage and she was trying ever so hard to convince him of how much better his life would be with us. Four months later he finally came to meet us for the first time.
Michael Everest was a wonderful guy. He bought a new dress for Aurora in her favorite sunny yellow color and her first ever porcelain doll that looked every bit like a miniature version of her. I got a new dress as well, though it was a little less frilly as my sister's dress because I wasn't a frilly kind of girl, or so my mother told him. I also received a music box to go with my collection. It was a beautiful music box; a princess stood beside a majestic rainbow Pegasus, and both twirled on a base while the box played some old song I'd never heard. I admired it with the "oohs" and "aahs" I thought were expected of me, but I didn't like it at all. It wasn't that it was an ugly box or the music was not to my liking. It was the fact that I already had music boxes, just like I already had a father. And when my other music boxes disappeared I panicked, until I found out my grandmother had removed them one day while she was over, to protect them from a woman who didn't understand why they were so important to me.
A year later Michael showed up at my mother's door with a divorce decree and an engagement ring. His divorce was actually finalized. In the end they split everything evenly down the middle, except the wife got the house and Michael got us, which meant he kept the condo he had purchased and therefore was expected to live there. He moved in the very next day, and he and my mom were married a month later. He was a great stepfather, who would take us to the park and to the zoo on weekends, and would read us bedtime stories at night. He would sometimes go clothes shopping with us, making certain we both got equal amounts of clothing and shoes, even though my fashion sense was already leaning toward denim and t-shirts whereas Aurora was already leaning toward trendy and fashionable. His family was very accepting of us, inviting us over for family get-togethers and introducing us as their nieces or their grandchildren. It was so different from anything we had ever experienced, and it was so wonderful to finally have a dad to give us that fatherly advice we had up until that point been able to only get from our grandfather. I really loved Michael, and so, I think, did Aurora. Which is why the divorce announcement almost four years later came as such a shock. Or maybe it didn't. Maybe we had been waiting for that other cursed shoe to drop all along.
Michael and my mom had a lot of problems toward the end of their marriage. We never saw anything, but we heard plenty. We heard her hysterical screams, we even heard him raise his voice every now and then. Most of it was Mom accusing of working long hours so he could cheat on her with other women. Michael denied it of course; denied it vehemently because he was so in love with her. But Mom had gotten so used to men mistreating her, sometimes in reality and sometimes in her own mind, she couldn't ceased the voices in her head that told her he was just like the rest. And finally, after years of constantly fighting the same battle with her, I guess he gave up. One night our bedroom door opened, and we could hear Michael's shaky voice as he whispered "Goodbye, sweetest little angels." in a shaky voice that resonated with the calamity we felt in our hearts was imminent, even as he thought we slept. He announced to her that very same night that he had fallen in love with someone else, he couldn't take the fighting anymore and he was leaving her for the other woman. Mom threw a lot of breakable things that night; the noise and the screams brought us both to frightened tears. And the next morning Mom was packing once again, taking us back to our grandparents' house until she could figure out what to do next.
I was fifteen when they separated and Aurora was twelve. It was my second year of high school and her second year of middle school, and we seemed to be worlds apart. She was one of the trendy people at school, and by seventh grade she had already established herself as one of the girls to envy. I was starting tenth grade and wasn't established in anything. Medora Parker was just another student in a huge ocean of students passing each other without a second glance. But at least I was among the unnoticed, which meant I wasn't popular, but I wasn't the scourge of the school either. But our different statuses in life meant Aurora and I were now strangers living in the same house. Her interests were different from mine, and at times I think my very existence embarrassed her. That one moment in the bedroom was the first time we felt anything collectively in a long time. Psitharis had been gone so long it was a long-faded memory, so there was no solace there. It was so long ago there was no way to reach back.
Fast forward to two years later, in the living room of the house my mother's divorce settlement purchased, and suddenly Psitharis made a return appearance. And it wasn't a comforting experience; the very short dreams had been something akin to a nightmare. There was no blue glow from the castle, no happy sounds coming from the amusement park, only agonizing silence and the darkness of the final dying moments of the night, coated in fog, illuminated only by a scattering of lights where the predawn sky would have been lit by thousands of lights before. And there was the man. And the fact that in the world I once called mine I was now branded a traitor.
