The Color of Hope (The Color of Heaven Series) (2 page)

I don’t know the answers to those questions and probably never will. But based on my behavior as an adult woman and how I dealt with relationships, I suspect that I missed out on the sort of bonding experience that shapes most children whose mothers don’t die in childbirth.

I was four years old when someone finally adopted me, and for better or worse, I became part of a new family.

My mother worked as a maid in a Washington DC hotel that catered to visiting civil servants and politicians. My father was a bricklayer with a drinking problem.

Their divorce was finalized when I was nine, which was probably for the best, because I spent far too much time hiding under my bed when they argued. The sound of my mother’s shrieking voice filled me with dread because she never backed down from a fight and always called my father out when he blew the entire week’s grocery budget at the tavern on payday.

My father wasn’t talkative. He responded to her complaints with the back of his hand. To this day, I still jump at the sound of breaking glass or a lamp being knocked over in another room.

After my father left, Mom and I lived in our tiny apartment for a few years, until Dad stopped paying child support. That’s when everything began to spin out of control.

I
’
M SURE THERE
are periods of your own life that shine brightly in your memory because they were especially happy times, and there are other times you might equate with an earthly version of hell.

For me, a memorable set of events occurred in 1998 when I was twelve and Mom was late with the rent for the third month in a row.

“Please, Mr. Osborne,” she said at the door while waving at me to go back to my room. “Just give me until next payday. I’ll have the whole cheque for you then. I promise.”

“That’s what you said last month,” he replied, “and the month before that. I got a waiting list for this place, and I ain’t putting up with this crap when I don’t have to. It’s time you found a cheaper place to live.”

Mr. Osborne shoved an envelope into my mom’s hand and walked away.

“What is it?” I asked from the hallway beyond the living room.

Mom shut the apartment door, broke the seal on the envelope, and read the letter inside. “It’s an eviction notice.” She carefully refolded it and slipped it back inside the envelope. “It means we can’t live here anymore. We have to pack up our stuff.”

“And go where?”

More than a little concerned, I followed her into the kitchen to where her purse was sitting on the table. She rifled through it and withdrew a pack of cigarettes.

“I’m not sure yet,” she said, placing one in her mouth and lighting it. “But if worse comes to worst, we can always head out west and stay with my parents.”

I’d met my adoptive grandparents only twice in my lifetime, and the idea of driving across the country to live with complete strangers who had never even sent me a birthday card was not particularly appealing to me. I had friends here in Washington and I liked my school. Most days, at least.

Mom opened the refrigerator door. The light from inside illuminated her face. How relaxed she appeared in her tight jeans and red spike heels, as if her only concern was what she would feed me for dinner. Would it be rice and canned corn again? Or Velveeta sandwiches? I was pretty sure there wasn’t much else in there.

A few weeks later, I came home from school to discover my key wouldn’t work in the lock.

For two hours, I sat outside the building in the frigid November chill, waiting for Mom to come home from work, certain that she’d be able to straighten everything out.

But we were not allowed back into our apartment. Ever. All our belongings had been removed to a storage unit in the basement of the building. Mr. Osborn left a note saying that if we didn’t collect everything within thirty days, he would have no choice but to dispose of it himself.

The super let us in to find our suitcases and pack enough things for the next week or so, which we stuffed into the back of Mom’s rusted out Ford Tempo.

She had enough cash to pay for a motel room that night, but it was a dumpy establishment with a giant spider in the bathtub.

The next morning, I went to school as usual and Mom went to work. She picked me up at the mall at suppertime after I finished my homework in the food court.

“Are we going to stay in that motel again?” I asked, dropping my backpack onto the floor at my feet.

Mom lit a cigarette before pulling out of the parking spot. “Not tonight. I have sixteen dollars in my purse, and that’s gotta last until I get paid on Friday.”

“But today’s only Tuesday. Where will we sleep? And I’m hungry.”

She gestured towards the back seat. “Grab my purse. I took some leftovers from the hotel kitchen.”

I reached around to fetch it and found a plastic bag inside with cold French fries, a roll, and a Styrofoam container full of warm chowder.

Normally, I wasn’t a fan of soups, but I was so hungry I devoured it in three minutes flat. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted, but until that point, I think I had believed all soup came out of a can.

“What about you?” I asked. “Did you eat?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “I get my meals at the hotel.”

“That’s lucky.”

She scoffed and peered at me with a raised eyebrow. “What do you say?”

“Thank you for bringing this.”

“Damn straight.” She dragged on her cigarette and tapped the ashes out the window.

After scraping the chowder bowl clean, I snapped the lid back on, then ate the roll and French fries.

“So where are we going to sleep?” I asked, assuming Mom had it all figured out.

She flicked the blinker and turned onto the freeway. “I’m not sure. We may have to sleep in the car.”

“What?” Little did I know it was only to be the
beginning
of our wretched homeless period. “No way! It’s November! What about going to the bathroom? And I’ll need to change for school tomorrow!”

She merged into the middle lane and pressed on the accelerator. “Stop whining. We’ll find one of those rest stops where we can go inside and hang out. They have bathrooms. You have a book, right? And your Walkman?”

“The batteries are dead,” I tersely replied, because I wasn’t happy about this. Not at all.

“That sucks. Well, I don’t have money to buy you new ones right now.”

Resting my elbow on the side door, I cupped my forehead in a hand. “Why can’t we just go home? I want to go
home
!”

A muscle twitched at her jaw and she gripped the steering wheel tight in both fists. “You think I don’t want that? I’m at the end of my rope, here, Nadia, with sixteen bucks to my name. If you want to yell at someone, yell at your deadbeat father.”

“But he’s not here!” I sobbed.

“Exactly!” For a long moment she paused, then spoke in a calmer voice. “But I’m here, and I’m doing the best I can, so don’t give me any more grief. I have sleeping bags in the trunk, so we’ll spend the night in the car, in the rest stop parking lot. Just pretend like we’re camping.”

She drove faster down the freeway while I put my feet up on the dash and sat back in angry silence.

I
’
M NOT SURE
what time it was when I was startled awake by an aggressive pounding on the hood of the car. Curled up on my side in the back seat, I sat up and squinted into a blinding light aimed at my face.

“What the hell do you want!” my mother screamed.

Confused and disoriented, I shaded my eyes with the back of my hand. Was it a cop checking on us? I wondered.

Mom sat up in the front seat and shouted at the man at her window. “Get the hell away!”

A burning sensation exploded in my belly as I realized the man was no cop, and my mom was behaving like a rabid dog backed into a corner. All my muscles tensed and I screamed when a second man rapped on the window by my head.

“Mom!” I cried.

“Got any money?” the man asked me. Then he rattled the door handle, trying to force it open. Thank God it was locked.

Mom quickly turned the key in the ignition and burned rubber to get us out of there. The tires squealed, and I’m sure we left twenty feet of skid marks.

I was crying uncontrollably by the time we pulled out of the parking lot onto the freeway. “Who were they?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Mom replied. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel as she checked the rear-view mirror.

Still in the back seat, I tossed the sleeping bag aside and tried to take deep breaths, to stop crying and calm my racing heart.

“That was scary,” I said. “I don’t want to go back there.”

“We won’t.”

I’m pretty sure she was speeding. She must have been going at least eighty miles an hour.

That’s when I heard the wail of a siren, and turned to look out the back window at a set of red and blue flashing lights behind us.

“
L
ICENSE AND REGISTRATION
please,” the police officer said when Mom rolled down the window.

He shone his flashlight into the back seat and aimed it at my face. Like before, I squinted and held my hand up to block the blinding ray of light that stung my eyes.

“Is that your daughter?” the cop asked.

“Yes.” Mom fished through her wallet for her licence. I noticed her hands, with those long red painted fingernails, were trembling. The cop took the light off me and used it to examine the licence she passed to him.

I felt nauseous by then, like I was going to throw up. I just wanted to go home.

“Do you still live at this address?” the cop asked.

Mom handed him the vehicle permit, which she’d retrieved from the glove compartment. “Not exactly,” she replied. “We got evicted yesterday. We stayed in a motel last night, but I don’t get paid until Friday, so that’s why we were camping out in the car. We were at the rest top back there, but a couple of suspicious looking characters banged on the window and asked us for money. That’s why I was speeding. I was really freaked out. I’m
still
freaked out.”

I felt frozen with fear in the back seat, convinced the cop was going to haul us off to jail and lock us up for life.

“You don’t have anywhere to stay tonight?” he asked. “No family or friends to take you in?”

“No. It’s just me and my daughter.”

He leaned down to look at me. “You okay back there?”

Terror gripped me. I couldn’t speak. All I could do was nod my head quickly up and down.

The cop handed my mother’s licence and vehicle permit back to her. “You could try the homeless shelter, but you have to get there early.”

Mom shook her head. “I wouldn’t feel safe there.”

He leaned down to look at me again. “Where do you go to school?”

My heart pounded thunderously in my ears, but somehow I managed to make my tongue work, and told him what grade I was in, and the name of my school.

“I’ll get her there on time tomorrow,” Mom assured him, “and we’ll be fine as soon as I get paid. I already have a lead on a new apartment. Someone at work...”

I suspected she was making that up, because she hadn’t mentioned that to me.

“This is just a rough patch we’re going through right now,” she added.

The police officer was quiet for a minute.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’m going to let you off the hook with a warning this time. No more speeding. You got that? And we’ll check out those suspicious looking characters you mentioned. Drive safely, now.” He returned to his paddy wagon while Mom turned the key in the ignition.

“Jesus,” she said. “He didn’t even call it in or check my license. I guess it’s our lucky day, because I really can’t afford to pay a speeding ticket right now.”

She pulled onto the road and drove slowly for at least a mile, nervously checking her rear view mirror every few seconds, just in case the officer changed his mind about letting us go.

Sure, I thought. What a lucky day.

P
AYDAY ON
F
RIDAY
was like waking up Christmas morning. We’d slept in the car in a different parking lot each night, and thankfully Mom didn’t get pulled over again for speeding.