Finding Home (Zak Bagans Daughter)

Chapter Three

He laughed.

"As I was saying" He continued. "No, I don't do it alone; I actually have a whole crew with me.  But only three of them really do any of the gatherings of evidence" He paused. "They're like my family, no, they are my family. We're always there for one another and we are always just being dimwits and whatnot, but I love them. I would love for you to meet them." He smiled. Most likely re-playing a good memory he had of his family-like crew.

Now it was his turn to ask questions about me. "What was your mom like when you were growing up?" This was going to a tough one to explain. I sighed and looked back at the worker before answering his question.

"That's a very, very long story."

He shrugged. "We've got time."

I leaned back into the bench looked into the park.

"Where do I even start? I remember small moments of her being a great mother, but the majority of those moments were before the accident."

"The accident?" He asked.

I nodded. "The accident," I repeated.

"You see before I was born my real dad wanted nothing to do with me, and so my mom left and came here. When things got too hard she got really into drugs and drinking and couldn't take care of me. That was when I got sent into foster care for the first time. I was only two. That was when she realized how badly she messed up, and she cleaned up her act so she could take care of me and get me back. That was when she met Ray, my stepdad. He cleaned her up, he made her a better mom. He brought purpose into her life. But, just a few years later and he got into a car accident with me in the back seat. I was the only survivor. That was the accident.

Zak took a deep inhale, "How old were you?"

"I was four."

He sighed.

"When Ray was alive, she was a good mom. She used to let me stay up late and she would help me with my homework like any good mom."

Zak smiled.

"But after Ray died, she was never the same. It only took her a few days to fall back into her old ways, but worse. She started staying out more at night and it gradually got worse, to points where she came home so drunk she forgot she even had a daughter. Then she started blaming me for everything that went wrong in her life. She blamed me for my dad not wanting her when she told him she was pregnant, she did it so much I hated myself for it too. By the time I was seven she started to leave me alone for days. I had to learn how to fend for myself. I was stealing food at the cafeteria at school I was so hungry. That was when the school staff noticed something was wrong and for the second time I was put in a foster home. That was for a year."

"Oh my God Charlie."

I sighed. "It gets worse."

She got me back just before I turned nine, and for a while it was okay. She was there a lot more and she even gave me the feeling she cared for me. But that all changed when I turned 12. One day she came home because she got fired for coming to work on drugs, and we fell right back into the pattern that got us in trouble in the first place. She became a street worker to make money which led to more drugs and even more problems. It got really bad when she started to have her boyfriend from her job come over; they were just mean drunks who wanted an easy girlfriend. One time when I was 13, her boyfriend Jeff came back to the apartment drunk after finding out that she had been cheating and started to beat the absolute shit out of her. When I came home from school that day she was on the floor all bloody and he was sitting on the couch drinking a beer watching basketball. I guess all the rage that had been building up all those years finally got released. I snapped. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and threatened him, telling him to get the fuck out of my damn house or I would call the cops and get him arrested."