The Forgotten One

Chapter One

              I sat back in Mrs. Jensen’s late model Toyota and watched the scenery out the window. Large evergreen trees lined the side of the narrow highway, thick and secretive. Beyond the break of the trees a lake stretched on as far as I could see. The bank was littered with smooth, gnarled fingers of driftwood and thick green muck that had washed ashore. Periodically a boat would zip by, men sitting patiently with their poles in the water. It was an unusually sunny day, contrary to the usually dreary and wet Oregon weather.

              I turned my head toward the middle aged woman in the drivers seat and studied her face. Mrs. Jensen was starting to show signs of her age. The thick black hair that was so familiar to me now had pepperings of grey at the temples. There were lines around her mouth and eyes that hadn’t been there the last time I had seen her. She turned her dark chocolate colored eyes toward me and a sigh escaped her lips. That was her textbook reaction toward me and my “escapades”, as she liked to call them.

              “What were you thinking? Three months, Madison. Do you know how worried I was about you for all that time? I thought you were dead.”

              “What would you care?” I grumbled and turned my body toward the window, a weak attempt to shut her out.

              “Ten years. I’ve been doing this with you for ten years. Do you really think that I don’t care? You can’t keep running away. You’re seventeen now. We only have six months until your birthday, Madison. What are you going to do then? There’s nothing I can do for you once you turn eighteen. There is only so much I can do.”

              I could hear the exasperation in my social worker’s voice. I had put her through a lot in the last ten years and she had always stood by me. She was the one that showed up to court hearings and spoke to the judge on my behalf when I was caught shoplifting, or came and picked me up in the middle of the night when a foster family called to send me away. It was her that picked me up that night ten years ago, when this whole cycle started. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window and closed my eyes. It hadn’t been easy for either of us.

              “Hey there princess.”

              I was sitting on the bathroom floor coloring in my Barbie coloring book with the three broken crayons that I had found under the sofa in the living room. My nightgown was smeared with peanut butter and jelly from the sandwich I had made for myself quietly in the kitchen. Daddy had his friends over and I didn’t want anyone to see me. When they saw me, sometimes they did bad things to me.

              “Hello.” I stood up and gathered my things. The big man in the doorway was watching me and I didn’t like it. He was unbuttoning his belt and I tried to move out of the way to go around him and find another hiding place.

              “Where you going?” I could tell by the man’s voice that he had been drinking my daddy’s beers from the fridge. He sounded funny, like daddy got sometimes.

              “To bed.” I dodged the big hand that reached out toward me and ducked out the door, running as fast as I could to my room. I jumped onto my bed and pulled the covers tight up around my head.