I take a bite of lo mein, buying myself more time. It’s delicious.
“My mother is an addict,” I finally blurt out. Elsie freezes with a forkful of noodles halfway to her mouth. She snaps out of it quickly, closing her lips around her fork and nodding for me to continue.
And finally, for the very first time, I do.
I tell her everything.
I tell Elsie about what it was like growing up with Sasha, who started using when she was only seventeen, a couple years before I came along. She tried to be a mom, at least at first, but she was going at it alone – she had no clue who my father was – and she was surrounded by people who were just as deep into their own addictions.
“By the time I was two or three years old,” I tell her, hating the way my voice sounds hoarse already, “she quit trying.”
Part of me hates that I’m ruining the positive image she probably has of Sasha after our dinner the other evening, but the rest of me knows she has to hear this.
“From then on,” I continue, “it was a vicious cycle of neglect, abandonment and being bounced between whatever shitty apartment or motel we were living in at the time and my grandparents’ house. Sometimes she would up and leave me, running off with a boyfriend or her friends. I don’t know if she forgot about me entirely, or if she just didn’t care to stick around and take care of me. My grandparents checked in frequently, so I was never left on my own for more than a couple days before they’d show up to whisk me away to their house.”
“Declan,” Elsie whispers. I glance up from my plate and find her studying me with so much sympathy on her pretty face that it’s hard to look at. I take another bite and chew for a few seconds before continuing.
“Somehow, my mom always managed to get me back. She’d waltz into town days, weeks or even months later, armed with a sob story nobody believed and a lawyer who knew the right things she needed to say to convince a judge she was fit to raise me. I lost track of how many times my grandparents tried to contest her custody in court.
“We bounced around a lot, so it was rarely the same judge working our case,” I explain. “And she was my mom. There was only so much my grandparents could do, in the eyes of the law and a broken family court system.” Even all these years later, it still makes me angry when I think of all the people who could have stepped in to help me, but didn’t.
I try to spare Elsie all of the gory details. I don’t tell her about the times I’d have tiny little flies buzzing around me because it had been so long since I’d been bathed, or the nights I’d try to cook myself dinner with next to no ingredients, because there was never enough food in the cupboards or fridge. Sasha was often too high to realize she needed to eat, let alone feed me as well.
I don’t tell Elsie about all the times I saw Sasha passed out on the sofa, with discarded needles or joints or pills, or sometimes all three. Sometimes she was by herself, but oftentimes she was slumped against a man she barely knew.
I nearly quit talking when I notice Elsie crying silently, hot tears streaking down her cheeks. “Please continue,” she says, swiping at the wet tracks on her face. “I’m sorry. Ignore me.”
I want to set our plates down and tug her into my lap, but I don’t know if I’d have the courage to continue. How could I talk about my dark, fucked up past with something as sweet as her in my arms?
So I continue. I jump forward a bit, telling her about how my grandparents finally got full custody of me when I was fifteen.
“Sasha disappeared for seven months, and in Maine, six months is the threshold for legally being considered abandonment,” Iexplain. It’s the kind of thing that the average person doesn’t know, if they’re lucky. “At that point, my grandparents were finally able to make their case and get legal custody of me, saving me from being turned over to the foster care system.”
Elsie nods, blinking rapidly like she’s trying to fight back more tears.
“I lived with them until I turned nineteen. I tried to stick around for as long as I could, but it got to a point where I just needed to leave. I didn’t care where I went. I just couldn’t be in Portland anymore, in a place that held so many negative memories for me.”
I set my fork down and flex my hand, glancing down at the permanent reminder that I got inked soon after leaving Portland. The black letters spelling out STAY GONE across my knuckles have faded a bit over the years, but I get the stars on my thumbs touched up now and then.
Elsie eyes them curiously. “That makes sense,” she says, nodding. “Where did you go?”
“I went to Boston for a few years. I had a friend from high school who had started tattooing, and he promised to help me learn. From there I went to New York. Then Philly. I did another brief stint in Boston, just for a few months. I didn’t like the shop I ended up at, so I moved on to D.C. Then I went back to Boston again, where I lived until I moved here.”
“You must really like Boston.”
“I love it there,” I tell her. “If I was a little bit less fucked up, I would have stayed the first time.”
“What do you mean?”
I shrug, like I’m not about to confess one of my biggest character flaws. “I’m a runner. When shit gets to be a little too real, or I start to feel a little bit too settled somewhere, I leave. Always to another big city, where I can blend right in.”
“And yet,” she points out, “here you are.”
“Here I am.”
She pokes around at the food left on her plate, then peeks up at me again. “Do you plan on staying?” She asks the question hesitantly, like she’s afraid of what my answer might be.
“I do, yeah.” I shrug, though it’s not something I take lightly. “I promised Sean when I moved here to work with him that I’m in it for the long haul.”
