Broken

CHAPTER TWO: Fear

"Tell me that you've noticed that beautiful fear. The one that rests inside silently and reminds us that we live."

Ariana Dancu

I started my life in a trailer park in Virginia. My mother, Linda, was rarely home and when she was, she was either drunk, stoned, or both. She had once been beautiful. I remember seeing pictures of her wearing fancy dresses before I was born. She had a crown of fiery red hair and enormous blue eyes. She had been a contestant in the Miss Virginia beauty pageant but had drunk most of her beauty away.  She told my father daily she could have had any man she'd wanted. She made sure he knew she regretted marrying him. My father was disdainful of her most days and hostile on others.

They would argue about my mother's infidelity. She used my father's paychecks for drugs and booze. He despised her with every breath he took. Our home was a war zone, full of broken crockery and furniture. The only thing missing was actual gunfire but I never ruled that possibility out.

It was my older sister, Sarah, who looked after me. She made sure I had food when our parents were too busy fighting to bother feeding us. She would take the change left lying around the house and carry me to a gas station on the corner. Sarah would buy a hot dog and then stuff ketchup into our pockets and underwear. I would stare hungrily at the hotdog until Sarah split it between us when we got back to the trailer. She would pull a stool up to the stove and turn the ketchup into tomato soup.

We hid in the tobacco fields when my parents' arguments grew violent. Sarah made games of hiding in them. She would pretend we were forest nymphs and had to rescue lost princesses. We pulled flowers from the dogwood trees and rolled for hours down a giant ditch.

Sarah made sure that we stayed in the fields until it became dark enough for us to sneak back into the trailer. My mother had usually passed out drunk and my father had gone to bed, if he was there at all.

My parents divorced when I was three. My father became a man I saw only a few more times for the rest of my life, mostly at funerals. I barely knew him. I remembered little about him, other than the faint memory of him buying me a tricycle at Christmas. My strongest memory was the sound of him yelling profanities at my mother. She only spoke of him when she was angry about the child support arriving late.

We moved to Tennessee to be closer to my mother's family after the divorce. She bought her father's old house in a quiet neighborhood. The brick two-story home had seen better days. It was old, but graceful in its own way. Buying it was the only sensible decision my mother ever made.

We had an aunt named Kathy who lived one street back from us. We could climb the fence to go to her house but we weren't welcome there most of the time. I had to be desperate to go to Aunt Kathy's.

My mother remarried to a fat, coarse man named Earl who was sparse on manners. He drank a great deal, smoked incessantly, and told bawdy jokes to everyone. He was a truck driver who started taking me out on the road with him "to have fun" when I was about five years old. I hadn't wanted to go but my mother wanted to get rid of me and her foul scented husband.

He forced me to give him blowjobs. He told me to keep it a secret or I would regret it. I will never forget the stench that clung to me after. I told my mother about what he had done. She beat me until blood ran down my legs from the thorns in the switch she used.

Linda drank, gambled, and had men over to our house unless Earl was home. On Friday mornings, she made us clean the house furiously. She beat us with a strap or a switch if we hadn't cleaned everything to her satisfaction. Earl came home every Friday evening with another paycheck. They would drink together until they passed out.

I escaped my life with books. I learned to read at six and pulled out Grandma Spencer's enormous stack of romance novels. I had hidden them in the back of a closet. I read them all and some three or four times until I got a library card at seven.

I loved Grandma Spencer. Every summer, she took Sarah and me for a month. She had long black hair like Sarah in her youth, but over the years it had acquired gray streaks at the temples. Her eyes sparkled like topaz gems when she laughed. She owned a little house in the mountains. A stream ran through the field of her backyard with a forest of trees on the edge of it. We ran barefoot through the fields and played in the stream all month long.

One day, she took me through the woods on the outskirts of her land. She wanted to show me what she called faerie stones. They were large and formed a circle. The placement of the rocks seemed natural and yet unnatural all at once. I remember her looking at me as we sat on them and saying, "Paige, I think you have gifts that others won't understand. You can feel things coming, can't you?" I nodded.

Often I had a heaviness in my stomach and chest when bad things were coming. The heaviness gave me a sense of dread but I usually didn't know what was coming until it happened. I said, "I know when a bad thing is going to happen, but I don't know what it is."

"Sometimes it's better that way. Pay attention to everything around you when you have that feeling." Her face changed a little as she ventured, "I have a feeling that you can see the threads of our world, can't you?"

My eyes grew wide because she knew.

I had asked Sarah about the threads once. She had grabbed both my arms hard and stooped down to look me in the eyes. She warned me, "Don't you ever tell Linda or Michael what you just told me." 

Sarah refused to call our parents Mom and Dad. I kept it a secret but Grandma Spencer knew. She saw what I was thinking and chuckled at me. "Sarah was right. Don't ever tell them."

My Grandma Spencer's neighbors thought she was a witch. I overheard two women whispering about her in the little store at the bottom of the mountain. I asked her if she was a witch like the people in the CeeBee store said. Grandma Spencer laughed at me and said, "No, honey. I only see things that other people can't. Did you know that dogs can't see color?" I shook my head. "They only see in black and white. Now, what if you were a dog that could see in color? The other dogs would think you were crazy or call you names. All I am is a dog that can see color when the other dogs can't. You're a little like me but Sarah's sight is strong. It won't do her any good, though."

I asked, "What do you mean?" 

She shook her head. "There are things that no one can stop. There is a power in the universe that runs through all things. Your ability to harness that power is very strong. If you want to use it, think of what you want and ask for it but be careful. It may come in a way you don't want. Never use your power to hurt another person, Paige. You will be repaid three times worse. Karma will take care of them. Karma is inescapable." 

I understood Karma because Grandma Spencer explained it each time I did something bad.

Grandma Spencer spent the rest of the month teaching me everything she said I needed to know. "I'm sorry my son isn't the man I raised him to be but there is nothing I can do about him. He's a selfish fool. I can't stop what's coming to you because my time is short. I can prepare you. You need to listen to me and heed every word I say."

She taught me to make things happen by moving the threads with my mind or with words. I learned to concentrate on an object and ask it to do as I wished. I could make water hot or cold. I could move things and break them, too. I could control objects and even animals. She repeated her warning about harming others with my power. She taught me to hide my powers from others by putting up what she called "shields." They took some concentration at first but eventually, I could do it without thinking, even in my sleep.

She warned me to hide my powers carefully. She told me to close my eyes and she took my hand. My mind filled with visions of women and men hung, burned, shot, and stoned. I jerked my hand from hers.

In a somber voice, she said, "You need to know what can happen if people find out what you can do. I am safe where I am, but you will be in a much bigger world than my little mountain. Your power is stronger than mine and different. Never tell anyone or let them see you use it. Do you understand? Especially not your mother or stepfather. They are evil to the core. I don't care what happens, keep it hidden from them."

Grandma Spencer died when I was five and I remember attending her funeral. It was the last time I would see my father for many years. They were going to throw her books away but I took them. My mother was pissed but she let me have them for some unfathomable reason.

Earl r***d me on one of his drinking binges when I was nine. He came into my little bedroom and threw me face down on the bed. I had known something bad was coming all day. I thought I was going to be spanked when he pulled my panties down.

I will never forget his stench, the rotten scent of his breath, and the pain that tore through me. I screamed but he shoved my face into the mattress. Sarah screamed at the door until I heard a thump and she was silent. I wanted to stop him but I remembered Grandma Spencer's words. I could do nothing. I cried softly until it was over.

I went to my drunk mother for help. Blood poured down my legs and I cried in pain but she ignored me. She never took me to a doctor. She was afraid that what he had done to me would be discovered. Sarah begged her but my mother locked her in her room. The resulting infection left me virtually barren but I didn't know that until much later in my life.

The only reason I lived was that I climbed the fence to my aunt's house. She found me vomiting on her floor with a hundred-and-four-degree temperature. She knew what my stepfather had done but said nothing. She took me to a hospital. The hospital staff questioned me but the terror in my heart was too great. I never spoke a word about what happened.