Miseducated Page 4

  Having busted my sister’s face, Lucas fled the scene. We did not know where he went, but we guessed that neighbors might have heard the commotion and contacted the authorities. As we waited for Mom to get home, the four of us huddled together in Barry’s bed. Sierra was shaking, but she still held us tight. The last thing Lucas said before he slammed out of the house was “Now go upstairs and wipe that blood off your face.” But Sierra refused. She left her blood-soaked shirt and face untouched until Mom returned to witness what he had done to her.

  Mom arrived home in a rage. We knew she had had enough of him assaulting her children. She stormed up the steps calling, “Lucas! Lucas, where are you?” She’d thought he was still home when they’d spoken on the phone but quickly discovered that he was nowhere to be found. “Sierra, Barry, Brandon?” she called. She opened and closed each door until she found us in Barry’s room. She was panting and frantic.

  “Sierra, what happened?” Mom asked. Her hands were clutching her hips and she was breathing heavily.

  Sierra told her the full story. How he was disrespecting Mom like he always did. How she finally stood up for her. How she was tired of him hurting us. How he battered and bloodied her face. How she tried to run and get help. Mom listened to it all. But none of us were prepared for her response. Of all the scratches and punches and kicks, Mom’s reaction was the most devastating blow of the day.

  “Well, that’s not what he told me,” Mom said. “Lucas told me that y’all were disrespectful and tried to jump him.”

  “What?” Sierra yelled. “Mom, he’s lying—”

  “Shut up, Sierra!” Mom cut her off, refusing to listen.

  “Please, Mom, he hit me in my—”

  “I don’t give a damn! I said shut up!”

  We stared in shock. The entire world stopped moving. Mom didn’t use curse words. Not even the small ones. So when she said “damn,” we knew whose side she was on.

  “That is my husband,” she continued, “and y’all are ruining my marriage!”

  Our hearts broke instantly. Mom saw him creep in and out, coming home reeking of distant fires. She watched us lose our last house to foreclosure because he failed to pay the mortgage. She watched our car get repossessed because he spent our money on drugs and hookers. She nursed the wounds and welts and sores that scarred my back because of him. All of this, because of him. And still, to her, we were the problem.

  Mom left the room in a fury. She slammed the door behind her and a wail of agony broke from Barry’s room. Sierra could not hold us anymore. This time, we held her. The realization that our mother was never going to choose us flattened us like a ceiling collapse. Mom wanted to be a godly wife. The one her husband used scriptures to describe. “The Bible says to submit yourself,” Lucas often charged. “And it says I rule this house like Christ rules the church.” When he opened the Good Book and pointed with his yellow-pigmented fingernail, she believed him. She was wrapped in a garb of oblivion and oppression. But her husband defined it as the cloak of a virtuous woman.

  Lucas returned home later that evening. We stayed in our rooms. Sierra spent most of the night on the phone, confiding in her best friend. At first, I’d later learn, they talked about the incident. Then they moved on to their usual topic: boys.

  “Girl, I gotta tell you about what happened the other day with me and Dame,” Sierra said. “We did it.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” her friend responded in surprise, eager for the juicy details.

  “Well not it it. But we did stuff,” Sierra said. They went on to talk about “stuff” that, as her brother, makes me uncomfortable to think about.

  The conversation lasted hours into the night before she hung up the extension. Sierra went downstairs to get a drink of water, not knowing that Lucas was in the living room. He was lounging and his eyes were as scarlet as usual. Sierra walked past calmly, ignoring his presence. But Lucas was determined to invade her space. He looked at her and said, “How did it taste?”

  Sierra stopped.

  “Excuse me?” she asked, scowling in his direction.

  “I said how did it taste? What you did to Dame?” His demonic laugh was imposing. It was haughty and baritone and wicked. Sierra saw the handset for the landline sitting beside him. She suddenly felt her stomach turn like she was going to gag. Lucas continued to laugh as Sierra walked away in shame.

  She poured a cup of water and leaned against the counter trying to gather herself. She would have rather stayed in the kitchen forever than to cross back through his line of sight. As she stood there, her eyes caught the knife block on the counter. She picked up a butcher knife, a steak knife, and every other knife that she could handle at once. Then she tucked them under her shirt and headed back to her room to think.

  She planned to kill him. And she spent all night imagining different scenarios. As soon as he went to sleep, she would sneak into my mother’s room and slit his throat while yelling like a madwoman. Or maybe she would do it quietly, like an impassive assassin. Or maybe she would stab him in the heart. Or maybe she’d slit his throat with the butcher knife and stab him in the heart with the steak knife concurrently and watch him bleed. And when my mother shrieked and screeched and screamed, she wouldn’t care. Because Mom would never have the opportunity to choose him over us again.

  After Sierra considered her options, she slid the knives under her pillow and closed her eyes to wait a few hours until he was sound asleep. She rested in peace knowing that he would go to sleep this night and never wake up to terrorize our family again. Our mom would be sad at first, but eventually she would acknowledge the truth of what he did to us while she was away from home. Sierra might spend years in juvenile detention, but it was okay as long as it meant that her three little brothers were safe. She was ready to take the fall. She slept until everyone was sound asleep, when her mission would begin. But by the time she woke up, it was already dawn. And she was angry that she had not seen it through.

  The next day, Sierra returned all of the knives but one. Having failed to kill her tormentor, she turned to a different plan. She sat on her bed with the blade in hand, her eyes toggling between the knife and her wrist. Maybe she could not end the pain for us. But there was one sure way that she could end her own. She grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper, and with tears dripping on the thin blue lines, she wrote a one-page note that ended with the words I can’t do this anymore.

  Before pressing knife to flesh, Sierra decided to break her silence. She called her father to tell the truth. Mr. Barry later told me about this moment and what happened afterward. It was the first time he’d heard of the horrors. He calmed her down and assured her that everything would be all right. He called my mom and the phone in her hand was smoking: “Liz, if he puts his muthafuckin’ hands on those kids one more time, it’ll be the last time he breathes!” Mom tried to keep the exchange private, but Lucas was listening to every word.

  “Hang up that phone,” Lucas yelled. “The Bible says I’m the man of this house.”

  But Mr. Barry would not let up. “Tell that scripture-quoting, crack-smoking husband of yours that if he ever touches Sierra, Barry, or Brandon again, I will drive to Richmond from New York to kill and bury him myself.”

  But Mom defended her husband. She denied that he was beating us. She denied any allegations of abuse. She said she had never seen him do such a thing and she did not believe it.

  “What the hell you mean, Liz?” Mr. Barry barked back. “My daughter’s face is busted and Brandon is walking around with welts all over his body.” But she protected Lucas. She wanted to be a godly wife. The threats did not matter, because Lucas didn’t stop beating us. Mom didn’t stop defending him. But Mr. Barry kept the pressure on and fought for us when no one else would.

  Months later we were summoned to court for a custody hearing. Mom dressed us to look like proper preacher’s kids and loaded us in the minivan. Lucas drove. We sat woefully in the back, suffering under his gospel quartet cassette tapes and his t
iresome lecturing about what it means to be a man and how he fulfilled every requirement.

  In the courtroom, Mr. Barry argued for custody of my sister and brother on the grounds that our well-being was in danger if we stayed where we were. He wanted to take me, too, if they would let him. The judge brought the three of us into his private chambers for questioning. Barry and I were too young to be interrogated. Sierra’s recollection is that the judge asked her a question that seemed to have no relevance to the custody dispute at all. One question only. No follow-up. Sierra was confused when he patted our heads and we were ushered back to the courtroom. Then the judge ruled in favor of my mother and Lucas, saying that allegations of abuse had not been corroborated by any evidence.

  Mr. Barry was a changed man. He was honest about his past life in the streets. But Lucas always found ways to use old charges against him. We were unable to convince the judge or other authorities that Mr. Barry had mended his ways and was now the father that we all dreamed of. One who did not miss a holiday. One who drove for hours to be with us. One who treated me like his own. One who was determined to fight for us, emotionally and physically.

  Mr. Barry descended the courthouse steps with his head down and his heart broken. He unfastened his tie and walked a sorrowful path toward his car, his feet dragging. He could barely watch as we were herded into our van to be shuttled back to hell.

  “Daddy!” Sierra cried out. Her father passed one more mournful look in her direction to remind his baby girl that he was still there. Mom closed the van door and we pressed our faces against the window, our mute expressions begging Mr. Barry not to go, begging him to keep fighting for us.

  Lucas made his way down the opposite side of the broad steps, wearing the same sadistic smirk he wore when tormenting us. He stared Mr. Barry down before his face widened into a victorious grin.

  As the two men passed each other, Lucas turned in Mr. Barry’s direction and said, “I’m the man of this house.”

  Mr. Barry stopped in his tracks. “What you just say to me?” he asked. From the car, we could see the tension brewing as their shoulders squared toward each other.

  “I said I’m the man of this house.”

  Mr. Barry stepped in closer. They were faced off like gunfighters in an old Western movie. Mom stepped out of the car like she knew things were about to get serious. “Lucas, let’s go!” she shouted. “Get in the car.” But by now the men were close together, yelling and cursing and pointing in each other’s faces. Bystanders were gathering around them.

  “I tell you one thing,” Mr. Barry said. “You touch those kids again and it’ll be your last day on earth.” Their noses were nearly touching. Mom kept shouting for them to stop and for Lucas to get in the car. But they were oblivious to everything except the hate burning between them.

  Lucas leaned in and said, “I’ll beat them as much as I want.” And Mr. Barry exploded in an uncontrollable ferocity. Their bodies crashed to the ground and they scuffled and tumbled on the pavement, punching and flipping and rolling.

  “Lucas, stop!” Mom yelled. But the fight was on. When Lucas tried to pin him, Mr. Barry tossed him to the side. He grappled Lucas’s legs into a figure four. He stretched one arm across Lucas’s windpipe, latched on to the other arm, and locked the chokehold so tight that Lucas’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. Lucas could not breathe, but Mr. Barry squeezed tighter. Lucas’s body flapped like a dying fish, but Mr. Barry squeezed even tighter. Suddenly, Lucas’s arms stopped moving. His eyes were rolling backward, and Mr. Barry clenched his teeth like someone who did not plan to let up. In Mr. Barry’s eyes was pain and love and desperation for his children. It was as if he saw nothing but the bruises on our faces and our bodies. So he squeezed tighter, as if our freedom depended on it.

  “Sierra, go get help!” Mom yelled. “Run, go get the police!”

  Sierra obeyed. She jumped out of the car and sprinted toward the courthouse. “Help! Somebody help!” Sierra screamed in panic. “My daddy is killing my stepdad!”

  The police officers rushed to the scene, yelling for Mr. Barry to let go. But he couldn’t let go. He was almost there. He was almost finished. He was almost at the point of saving us like he had promised by doing what no one else was willing to do.

  Lucas was limp and still, but Mr. Barry was not letting up. The officers grabbed Mr. Barry by his arms and pulled him off his enemy. He didn’t release his grip immediately but finally lifted his arms in a gesture of surrender. Lucas rolled over on his knees, coughing and holding his throat. The officers stood Mr. Barry on his feet and pulled his arms behind his back.

  “You’re under arrest,” the officer said, clamping the cuffs on his wrists. We watched our protector’s chin drop to his chest as the officers carried him away. Mom ran to comfort Lucas and help him to the car. It was all over. There was no one left to save us now.

  We were all hopeless and deflated. This felt like a devastating defeat for Sierra, Barry, their dad, and me. But we had no idea how that event would change everything. Our home became a lot quieter for the next several weeks. When Mom left for duty at Fort Irwin, California, she put enough cash on the kitchen counter for two weeks’ worth of food. As usual, we stayed in our rooms and out of Lucas’s way. Later that evening, when he hadn’t brought home take-out food like we expected, Sierra went to retrieve some money and order us dinner.

  But the money was gone. She looked around the house, and Lucas was gone. She checked outside, and the van was gone. We called Mom and she panicked. She was on the other side of the country and powerless to help.

  “He said he was going to get us Chinese food, but he never came back,” Sierra told her. “Nobody can know about this,” Mom said. If the authorities found out, she and her husband could be charged with child abandonment. She told us to stay home and not to talk to anyone or go anywhere besides school. Sierra put us on the bus in the mornings and she picked us up from the bus stop in the afternoon. We survived on spaghetti and meals Sierra had taught herself to make.

  Two weeks later, on the day before Mom returned, Lucas came back. There was a dent on the side of the van and he looked like he hadn’t bathed or changed clothes for weeks. His eyes were as scarlet as they’d ever been and he seemed incoherent. In his hand was the Chinese food he’d promised two weeks earlier.

  “Get in here and eat,” he yelled, placing the food on the counter. It was green and moldy and smelled like sewage. Sierra dumped it in the trash as soon as he went upstairs. Shortly after, he came down with bags in his hands. “Tell your Mom I’ll be back,” he said. But he did not come back. Lucas was gone. We never saw him again. When Mom got home, she grieved. She didn’t understand why her husband had left. But we knew why. It was because he had learned, on the pavement of that courthouse, that another man was willing to fight for us.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MIDDLE SCHOOL MENACE

  Although Lucas was no longer present in our daily lives, he lingered in our nightmares. Each of us had been marked by his relentless cruelty. Mom was emotionally, spiritually, and physically abandoned. Sierra was a beautiful and popular girl but she had a hair-trigger temper, ready to throw a punch at any person she distrusted. Barry felt sorry that, as the oldest boy, he could not protect any of us. As the youngest, Ben’s memories were not as distinct as the rest of ours. But it seemed that I had been impacted the most. Forced by Lucas to write that I was a bad child, hundreds of thousands of times over, I eventually believed it. When I looked in the mirror to brush my hair for school, sometimes his specter reared up behind me, telling me I was ugly and shoving my face against the glass until I conceded. At a time when surging hormones make all preteens question who they are and what their place in the world will be, my answers had already been supplied by my sadistic stepfather and the toxic environment he’d created.

  My maternal and paternal sides of the family were diametrically opposed. Mom’s New York side of the family was a wide-screen, large-cast version of our own household: my siblin
gs and I were like Bébé’s kids. Dad’s southern family was the opposite. They reminded me of the Huxtables from The Cosby Show: educated, successful, and ultra-conservative. My dad idolized his father. Papa was a Renaissance man: deeply religious, dexterous, and widely regarded for his achievements. He led community revitalization projects in the poorest neighborhoods of his community, where he demolished and built houses for families in need. He held a doctor of divinity and once served as the president of a seminary. He was the chaplain for the local sheriff’s department, he chaired and served on numerous boards, and he pastored a small church for over forty years. My father was Papa’s namesake and always wanted to make him proud.

  The firstborn of three sons, Dad was Papa’s expected heir. He wanted my father to follow the path he blazed in academic and civic achievement. But Dad took a different path by enlisting in the army after graduating from high school. And Papa’s disappointment was heightened when Dad revealed that he was expecting a child out of wedlock with my mother, an uneducated immigrant woman who was a decade his senior, a lifer in the army, separated but still legally married to a drug dealer, and the mother to two children, one of them only sixteen months old. This was not the dream Papa had for my father. Their relationship soured and ultimately left Dad feeling that he had to prove his worth over and over to measure up to his father’s legacy. In terms of being a father to me when I was young, he more than measured up. Dad was everything that I wanted him to be, until he wasn’t. And that happened when the tables turned, placing him in the seat of disdain and me in the position of a prodigal.