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She would never do any of those things again.
I was whisked away with the lady who, I would recognize later, was from Child Services. And I sat in her office for hours, numb and confused and so sad that I swear my bones hurt.
She was on her phone, making calls, trying, I realized as an adult, to find someone to take me in so I didn’t go into an already overcrowded system.
In the end, she’d found me a place.
“This is your grandma’s house,” she told me as we pulled up outside of a ranch with big weeds growing out front.
“I don’t have a grandma,” I told her. I didn’t. My mom’s parents had passed away when I was younger. All I had for memories of them was the scent of cigar smoke that clung to my grandfather’s skin, then rubbed onto me when I sat on his lap, and the image of a big, bright blue ring on the finger of a knobby-knuckled, wrinkly hand as it stirred batter for chocolate chip cookies.
“This is your father’s mother’s house,” she told me. “You are going to be staying with her for a few days until your father can come get you.”
My father?
My father wasn’t even a memory.
He was a story, that was all.
One my mother had told me several times over the years since I was clearly a fatherless girl, one who was surrounded by children who had dads who attended their costume days at school or their talent shows, who grilled meat on the grill in the summer, and who put together all the toys on Christmas Day.
“Your daddy loved you so much, Syl,” my mom always assured me, running a hand down my hair, her voice sad. “He just wasn’t ready to be a father. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. But we can hope that one day in the future, he can be ready and come and be a part of your life.”
“Yours too?” I asked. Young, hopeful, wanting that cookie-cutter family that everyone else seemed to have for myself.
“Sure, baby,” she said, but when I revisited those memories as I got older, I could hear the way her voice had flattened out.
So, she’d been telling the truth about my father loving me. But she clearly wanted nothing to do with him herself.
I didn’t understand.
But, then again, I hadn’t known him.
My paternal grandmother’s house smelled of cigarette smoke. It didn’t have that same comforting, leathery smell that my grandfather’s cigars had. It was harsh and chemical, making my nose wrinkle, and my head ache.
My grandmother herself was a short, painfully skinny woman who kept her dark brown hair pulled back in a severe bun. She walked with a limp that I would later learn was from some sort of injury as a girl that had prevented one leg from growing to the same length as the other.
She’d been a cold, distant woman who’d directed me to my room, then left me there alone that entire night. To grieve the loss of my mother in a strange place and no one around to tell me it was going to be okay.
“Maybe that was for the best,” I told Voss, too steeped in my memories to realize how much I was revealing to a practical stranger. “Because it wasn’t going to be. Okay, that is. Nothing was ever really going to be okay again.”
I spent three days in that strange house, clouded in a haze of smoke from the cigarettes that my grandmother seemed to smoke to keep from eating.
There was next to nothing in the house that was edible. Grapefruits in the fridge. Some sad, wilted heads of iceberg lettuce, some canned tuna.
She said precious little to me.
It was tense and uncomfortable.
So much so that when I heard the knock on the door, the one that came from the father I’d never met, all I could feel was hope.
That he was there to save me, to take me away from this place, to bring me back to his lovely life full of Friday night pizza and movie marathons, to show me that love that my mother swore he had for me.
Some silly, naive part of me thought that when I finally laid eyes on him again, all the memories would come flooding back, that I would instantly feel connected and loved and happy again.
But it was a stranger who walked through that door. Tall, so tall his head almost hit the top of the doorway. And skinny. As skinny as my grandmother. Though he, thankfully, didn’t smell like smoke.
I don’t remember my exact first impressions, what the eyes of a grieving nine-year-old saw when she first laid eyes on her father.
But my father was brown-haired, and it was often long enough to brush his collar. His eyes were brown and his face had a bit of a sunken appearance around the eyes and cheekbones.
