The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (44 page)

Amber Stroman had, for the first time in the longest time she could remember, been sober for four months now. The entire apartment was a temple to the conquest of addiction. A calendar advocating drug-freeness hung on the front door, as though to remind Amber where not to go every time she left. On the fridge, beneath a chart detailing the proper schedule for children’s vaccinations, was Amber’s “Daily Moral Inventory,” a document obtained from her sobriety meetings, which told her which traits to avoid and which to cultivate:

Tena was sitting on a big, soft chair that was her favorite. She was in her early forties now. She still had that gash the length of a carrot running vertically down the left side of her neck, from the time that either she cut herself as a teenager or Mark Stroman cut her. After all these years, and Mark’s passing, she was still sticking with the story that she had cut herself. She was short and round and sweet to a fault, and given to making impolitic jokes, many of which she had learned from Mark and held on to. She was a person who laughed easily—sometimes she sent out a bit of her laughter after something she said to elicit some more from her interlocutor, which would convince her to unleash a great deal more of hers. She was still wearing the purple Jerry’s shirt from the burger joint where she now worked.
Like Amber, she had been clean for a while, almost a year, for the first time in a long time.

Amber seemed less anxious than a year ago. Her gaze had a new focus. She wore around her neck a red-white-and-blue flag-patterned locket, on a thin black string, containing her father’s ashes. Things were solid between her and Maria, who was also in recovery and who remained pretty much silent.

The five women had much catching up to do.

Erica was complaining about money: owing $400 for her truck payment that week, another $120 for insurance, then the elective but essential $30 for Friday after-work drinks at Montana’s.

Desireé, meanwhile, was somewhat insensitively talking about floating down some river with Chance.

Tena said she was working forty-nine hours a week or thereabouts serving Jerry’s burgers. Erica was getting thirty-eight to forty, but she was often allowed to get an extra hour in here and there.

Erica was now criticizing Desireé for her spending habits, saying that she never saved. Desireé countered that she had no bills to pay that month (perhaps the advantage of having a fiancé like Chance) and that she had plenty in the bank. Erica said her bank account contained $93.

Desireé said something admiring about Amber’s coffeepot, joking that she just might have to take it with her.

“You cannot take an alcoholic-in-recovery’s coffeepot!” Tena said. Besides, “coffee will put your ADD ass to sleep.”

In March of that year, eight months after her father left for good, Amber had quit Stephenville for this clean house in Brownwood. Tena was already in the city and sobering up, and Amber somehow realized that it was time: “I just got to, getting high wasn’t even fun anymore. I’d get high, and I’d feel guilty. I was tired of being worthless. I was ready to be Madyson’s mama again.” She still remembered how clear it became to her the last time she used, writing in her diary, taking stock of what she’d become: “I was done.”

She had remained in Fort Worth for a time after the execution, but it had thrown her even farther off the track. She started using again. Eventually she and Maria returned to Stephenville and lived for six months in the same trailer park where a friend had taken them in on short notice a year before. One day the man they were staying with, a meth head in his own right, told them they had to go. Amber called Tena in desperation.

“I told her, ‘If you don’t come and get me, then I’m going to a motel room and there’s gonna be plenty of dope,’ and that’s what my way of thinking was,” Amber said. “So she came and got me.” In just three weeks, sequestered from everyone she knew, in a place with rules, she and Maria both found jobs and Amber got into a free outpatient rehab program paid for by the state. The migraines she had suffered for years would soon cost Amber her job at a dry cleaner’s, but Maria had kept working to support them, and Amber felt herself being reborn: “Next month, on the third, it will be five months clean. Clean. Nothing: no drinking, no pills, no dope, nothing. Clean. Only thing I’m doing is smoking cigarettes and drinking a shitload of coffee. But that’s OK.”

What had most helped Amber through recovery was arriving at a deeper understanding of where her addiction came from. The AA meetings had taught that what she had was an illness, not a habit, and that there was, in her God, a power great enough to pull her out of her morass. The program had, Amber said again and again, helped her to “get out of self,” to overcome the inwardness that for her nourished addiction. To be whole and healthy was not to be without affliction, but to be even more aware of one’s place and duties in a world of others.

Amber was starting to sense her role in the family change. All her life, she had known that she was failing them, especially Erica. She should have been there for her little sister; instead, she had been strung out or semihomeless or in prison. In the last few months, though, she had detected a momentous change in the family dynamics: Erica and the others had started calling Amber for advice.

“They take what I have to say,” she said. “I guess it’s different today, because I’ve got my shit together. I’m sober. I’m not the fly-by-night family member like I used to be. I’ve got my head on my shoulders. So, yeah, I’m not gonna be their best friend, and I’m not gonna tell them what I think they want to hear. I don’t care if they get mad at me. If I can save them any pain, if I can keep them from going through the shit I had to go through, I would.”

Still, in Amber’s mind, all these things were fringe benefits. The only prize that mattered was Madyson, and that prize now felt closer than ever. Yes, like her mother, Amber had lost hold of her baby. Unlike her mother, Amber now had the opportunity to win her baby back before she was old enough to know too much.

Like Erica with McDonald’s, Amber had the steps laid out in her mind. She needed to upgrade the apartment so that by the time she went to court and reclaimed Madyson, the little one could have her own bedroom. Grandma wasn’t going to give Madyson up easily, but if Amber was clean and sober, living in a decent space, with a durable relationship and—not least—a good attorney, she could outwit Grandma. There was a new urgency to her plan: she had heard that Madyson’s father was getting out of prison in a matter of weeks. By law, he wasn’t supposed to be around Madyson, because of his past behavior; in reality, he had nowhere to go but his grandma’s. It pained Amber that she, after everything she’d done to turn around, would be here with her moral inventory and vaccination schedule but without her baby, and he, on what would likely amount to a brief vacation from prison, would “be with Madyson from the time she wakes up till the time she goes to bed.”

At one point in the conversation, Tena sought to share in the blame for Amber’s travails. Tena had, after all, been homeless for a couple of years before Brownwood, bouncing around friends’ and relations’ apartments, dealing meth, depending on the worst men. What had happened was not only Amber’s fault but both of theirs.

“You know, if I would have been a better grandmother and if you
weren’t smoking methamphetamines, if you would have been a better mother and a better support system for your daughter, God wouldn’t have let Madyson get took away,” Tena said. “That’s my perception of it—whether it be true or not.”

Amber said that her mom was still living in the past and with regret. Channeling the lessons of the front door of her refrigerator, Amber told Tena that she had to forgive, not pity, herself.

Tena wouldn’t have it. “I blame myself for losing Madyson,” she said, “and we weren’t even together when we were getting high. But I feel like, if I had been at home, doing this job thing like I do every day, being a stronger backbone, maybe she wouldn’t have been out there doing that.” Here she was looking at Amber.

This Amber didn’t like. She said, “I would have been doing what I wanted to do, regardless of what you were doing.”

Tena had been the family pioneer in discovering Brownwood. Back in Dallas, bumming around homes not her own, Tena had one day mustered the courage to check herself into the Green Oaks psychiatric hospital. They recommended a sober-living house in Brownwood, and she agreed. Tena stayed in that house for a time, until they discovered that she lacked insurance of any kind, which was a requirement there. They pushed her out to a government-financed treatment center, where she remained for twenty-eight days.

Finally, she had ended up in a different sober house from Amber’s, but also in Brownwood, where she paid $100 a week in rent and lived with two others also in recovery. The house had an 11 p.m. curfew during the week, stretched to 1 a.m. on weekends. Even to stay at Amber’s tonight, Tena had to obtain a pass.

For Tena, an essential part of recovery was getting her faith right. “I know there’s a God,” she said, “but sometimes I think God would do more for Desireé than He will for me. God will take care of Desireé and her problems before He will mine. And that’s just because of the way I’ve lived my life. I feel like my God—I’ve turned my God to a punishing God, a strict God, a disappointed God, a God
that’s not happy with me.” Sometimes Tena flirted with polytheism by imagining her unitary Christian God as more like a brand with franchises: “If I need to, I borrow Amber’s God, because Amber’s God answers her prayers; Amber’s God takes care of her; Amber’s God loves her. So if I have to, I’ll borrow her God until I can identify who my God is.”

The sober house was just transitional. It was training wheels to learn to get out on your own. Because of it, Tena felt the ground beneath her shifting as never before—and not only related to her addiction. She realized, when faced with the reality of things, that she had never, until now, understood the meaning of work and of independence.

“I always depended,” Tena said. “I never depended on myself. And today I know, in order for me to have anything, I have to work. You know, nothing comes easy.” She felt good: “I’m self-supported. I work every day. I pay my rent. Every two weeks, I pay my rent. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I’ve always handed off to somebody.” The equation had become clear to her now: “If I work, my rent gets paid. If I don’t work, my rent don’t get paid.”

The country often argued about people like Tena. What would right her path, or give her a chance to rise, or help her to help herself? What, ultimately, was responsible for her condition—social structures, underfunded rehab and psychiatric care, dismal parenting, a decadent culture?

The trouble with these arguments was that they so often forced a choice between caring for the weakest and honoring their agency. The left-leaning political half of the country that spoke most eloquently about the poor and vulnerable could be less comfortable judging their family structures and child-rearing habits, telling them the truth about culture and behavior, burdening them with the consequences of their decisions; the right-leaning political half of the country, more comfortable with such judgment and truth-telling, tended not to make underdogs their highest priority.

Here in Brownwood, for the time being at least, Tena and Amber seemed to have found a kind of middle ground—their own blend of judgment and compassion, structure and freedom. They felt themselves newly alive. “I have self-respect,” Tena said. “I have my kids’ respect. You know, for a long time, that one right there was real disappointed in me.” She gestured at Erica. Then, on Father’s Day this year, Tena had received a text message from Erica that floored her. It reminded Tena how far she had come. It said, “Thank you for being both.”

Amber’s cell phone rang. She had been planning to turn it off in the next day or so, to save money, but it was on today, and it was Grandma on the line from Stephenville, probably with some question about Madyson. Amber picked up. The call went on and on, and Amber sat looking progressively grimmer as it continued. Her side of the conversation didn’t sound good.

“Yeah, he’s her daddy—I understand that,” she said to Grandma. “But she doesn’t know him like that.”

Pause. “Well, I’m sorry my family isn’t as perfect as yours!”

Pause. “So you’re saying Erica can’t see Madyson? Well, if that’s your choice right now. You are the sole conservator of Madyson. There’s nothing I can say. All I can tell you is Erica’s never put Madyson in any kind of danger. When I was fucking up, when I was off doing my thing, Erica was the only one there.”

When Amber hung up, everyone wanted a debrief. As it turned out, it had been a strange call, and Amber needed the group’s interpretation.