12 Rooms

When

It was mid October 2005. My tiny toes were turning blue and purple by the second but I feared speaking audibly in case I'd be punched for opening my mouth. Instead, I huddled in the frozen brick corner, shivering uncontrollably while my pathetic ass of a mother, blew grey streams of smoke around the teeny four walled habitat that was my home.  When the nasty swirls reached my nostrils, I coughed and gagged, feeling the normalcy of a painful migraine coming on.  At three years old, I had decided that I must be allergic to the steam, what with all the sputtering and ash-feeling ache in my stomach.

I do not have many early memories that are not clouded with that smoky drug glaze.  My mother's eyes were always bloodshot and sweaty; the hues that used to be blue, were permanently tainted by the cocaine she ingested every week.  When she tucked me into the rusty cot in the corner at night, her fingernails were nubby and black as coal and her breath that fanned my face almost made me vomit.  I quickly learned to hold my mouth shut and not breathe until she backed away.  My silence and nodding gave her the illusion that I was just too exhausted to speak. 

Those were the good nights.  The bad nights came more often when strange men I had never seen would drunkenly slam into the walls of our tiny abode and aggressively hang all over my mother.  At any normal time, I can remember three or four men, grinding on my mother, passing smoke swirls back and forth from mouth to mouth.   I always clung to a ragged cloth of a blanket and hoped they would not bother me as I pretended to be asleep.  Once or twice, I would manage to sneak outside and lay in the weedy grass out back.  It was not much more comfortable than my wrought iron bed, but it was fresher air to breathe. 

I woke up one morning in the dewy grass, wet from the drizzly rain last night, with a strange uniformed lady peering down at me.  I sat straight up and backed away towards my hut of a home.  The unknown lady called my name and cooed to me, promising to be safe.  I already had instincts to not trust a single soul, but was also scared to death to move thanks to some abusive memories from my mom's hunks, so I just froze. 

The lady standing in front of me must have immediately recognized my stiffness as she smiled softly, bent down to my eye level and held her hands out.  With a gentle voice, she explained that she worked with DFS and was here to give me a better home.  My three-year-old brain had absolutely no idea what that meant.  I remember shrugging my shoulders, turning around and walking inside.  I knew she was following me, but I did not care.  I was overly hungry and decided to follow my daily routine of searching the disaster of a kitchen for any leftover stale crumbs.  Normally, my mother would be totally passed out on the cold floor, eyes rolled back her head, looking catastrophically dead, but her chest heaving slightly so that I knew in my untrained mind that she was still alive. 

She was no where to be found when I meagerly ambled back inside.  Frowning, I turned back to the lady, four feet behind me.  I pointed to the empty concrete. "Where is she?" 

Karissa Pointe, as she had said her name was, looked pitiful as she frowned.  "The police took her away."

"So?"  Even at three, I knew exactly who the cops were and what they did.  They had visited my home several times since I could recall, and probably many times that I could not remember.  They would drag away some unlawful man from our house or handcuff my mom until she cried and begged to be let go.  I believe her excuse was always me...she never acknowledged that I was hers though.  I was always her sister's orphan or some other random relative, who she was indebted to be guardian of.  Somehow, she always managed to make them let her free.  Most officers required her to pay a fine though, to cover costs of ruckus or some other shit.  I was three; I figured she was in trouble because of all the sexual noise her and her gang made.  Even to this day, I am not sure how she paid for the fines.  Stealing money would make the most sense;  I believe she slept with some of the officers as payment too, because I woke up with an official gold badge next to me one morning. 

Karissa looked even more pitiful when I seemed not at all bothered by the fact that my mom was taken away by the police.  She tells me today that I requested to stay put at the house, knowing my mom would be back in a few hours.  But somehow, maybe at the promise of fresh hot food, she managed to get me to go with her in her fancy car.  She let me take my ragged cloth, as I refused to part with it. 

I was blessed, at three years old, to have Karissa as my social worker.  I had no idea what was going on at such a young age, but over two decades later, I can say that I am truly thankful.  Life did not instantly get better, I had so much more to go through, but Karissa always showed up when I was giving up. 

But more on that later.  For now, I was a confused little girl, who was more free than ever before, but I felt like a captive.  It was a feeling that would stick with me for years.