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Chapter 2- Cahira

When I was very young, Mama says she used to keep me on a leash when we went out to keep me out of trouble. I don't remember, but there're pictures to prove it. In them, Mama looks tired and worn down, with a million other things to worry about even without a toddler from hell to worry about it, in a patched cotton dress and her hair up in a scarf. My older brother, Pascal, holding Mama's hand as nice as pie, always the obedient one, the favored child. And then there's me. A chubby toddler buckled into a faded harness, pulling at the leash held tight in Mama's hand. You can see how hard I'm pulling, because you can see Mama's knuckles going white, the bone showing through her brown skin. In the pictures, my tightly curled hair is always wild and crazy. I guess some things never change.

Before Mama made the wise choice of investing in a leash for me, she says I ran away, and she couldn't find me for nearly an hour. She always tells how I was playing out in the backyard, with Mama sitting on the steps keeping an eye on me. She went inside for just a second to answer the phone, and when she came back, I was gone, vanished. Mama always recounts seeing a single, tiny pink shoe at the edge of the woods that borders our house. She walked deep into the woods, as the shadows of the trees stretched long across the ground. She called my name over and over again, each time hoping against hope that I would answer.

Finally, as the sun spread fire-bird wings to embrace the horizon, she heard her child's voice calling.

"Mama," It said. My mother looked around for the source of the voice, but she couldn't find it.

"Cahira, baby, where are you?" Mama said.

"Up here, Mama! Lookit me," She heard my voice say. She glanced upward, and there I was perched in the tree as nonchalantly as a bird.

"But you are not a bird," Mama always says when she tells the story. Birds have wings to fly with if they fall, and little girls do not!"

My young self, however, didn't seem to be aware of this difference, because she balanced easily on a slender branch, swaying easily back and forth to keep her balance in the stiff breeze that had sprung up as the sun went down.

"Cahira!" When Mama tells this story, I can always imagine her voice going all shrill like it does when she's upset. "Come down here this instant!" And I did.

Swinging and leaping through the branches like a monkey, I jumped and fell the last five feet, landing in a crouch like a spider. I straightened up and beamed at Mama, brushing off my hands as though to say, no big deal.

Whenever Mama tells this story, I can here the leftover astonishment in her tone. The next day she went to the store and spent all that month's tips from the diner on a child-sized harness and leash. She said it reassured her that such a thing existed. After all, if there was a market for such a thing, then there must be other parents with her same problem. Who knew, perhaps I wasn't the worst child in the world after all.

Mama always tells this story after I've been getting in trouble fighting at school. She threatens to resurrect the harness from the box in the attic of all my baby things and put it back to work.

Mama's kidding when she says she'll put me back on the leash, but I know she's serious when she shakes her head and says, "I just don't know what to do with you, Cahira." I know Mama has a lot on her plate already, what with three kids and a waitress's wages to pay for them. I wish more than anything I could be the good daughter she deserves, but no matter how hard I try, there's this cold flame of rage deep in my soul. Not anger. Rage.

Sometimes I just get angry for no reason at all. Sometimes a red haze hijacks my brain, and when it blows away, I have bruised knuckles heavy limbs, and the principal is asking me questions I don't know the answer to. Questions like why. Questions like how. And then I have to face the exhaustion in my mother's eyes, as she shakes her head and asks me what she's going to do with me.

In first grade I bit Tommy Pinkerton and slammed his head into the concrete over and over again because he was bullying younger kids. It took two teachers to pull me off of him. In third grade I elbowed Miranda Willis in the stomach because she was getting on my nerves, bragging about her princess themed birthday party and then only inviting the most popular kids. In fifth, I went psycho on some kid I didn't even know and flipped him over my shoulder because he called me a lesbo in the hallway at school. In eighth I twisted a boy's arm behind him because he slapped my ass. And once I reached high school, it got worse. A whole lot worse.

The only good thing that came out of starting high school was my girlfriend, Marilyn, Mari to me. She was the only one who could calm the fire in my head and make me feel a fire in my heart instead. When I was with her, I felt calm. My relationship with Mari was the only good one in my life, because she, at least, was never disappointed in me. If I had known that this anger and wildness embedded inside me would ruin that too, I would have run a whole lot sooner than I did. She was the last person I ever wanted to hurt.