Hell Child

This creative nonfiction piece is a deeply personal, autobiographical reflection on my childhood in foster care and navigating family displacement. Content warnings include themes of domestic abuse, trauma, and neglect.

Hell Child

By

Cade Lott

California, 1995.

The seats are leather. The door is heavy and slams when I pull it. When I press the button, locks engage with a uniform thud. The scent of Mom’s perfume lingers inside the car—faint notes of rose and lily.

I look straight ahead as Mom bangs on the windows with open palms. She wants me to get out, but if I do, she’ll leave again. My brothers and sister are still in the house. We’re supposed to stay together, but I can’t go back.

Looking through the window, beyond Mom, across the rock-covered yard, I see a small, white figure in the dark. It’s my dog, Freckles. I tune out Mom’s muffled voice and wonder what will happen to him if I’m not here to take care of him. I lie to myself and say it’s better if I’m not here.

Uncle Rick—that’s what we’re told to call him, but he’s not our uncle—doesn’t get the reactions he wants from me anymore. I don’t back away or cower when he screams in my face or cry when he hits me. When I stopped reacting, he started hurting Freckles to hurt me. He throws rocks at him and kicks him to upset me. If I’m not here, Rick won’t have a reason to hurt my dog.

Mom’s hair is freshly dyed and permed. My oldest brother, Sean, calls her the red poof. When Mom gets mad, he likes to run from her and scream, “Beware, here comes the Red Poof of Death.”

She showed up late for the sixth-grade Christmas concert tonight. She promised she’d be there early. I don’t know why I believed her. She rarely keeps promises. We were just finishing “O Tannenbaum” when she walked into the Gym. It was the one song I wanted her to hear. Mom told me she took German in high school. I wanted her to be surprised I knew a German song. I mostly had to mouth the words anyway. My throat still stings. I reach my hand up to rub it, and all the details of last night replay in my mind.

I’m on dish detail. The water is brown and not very sudsy, but I only have a few dishes left, so I keep washing. I sing, “We wish you a Merry Christmas,” while I scrub a plate covered in Ragu sauce. I don’t realize Rick is in the kitchen until he presses himself against me.

“Do you want help?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

He picks up a plate from the drying rack. “This isn’t clean,” he says, and drops it in the dish water.

I’m not supposed to talk back, but I mumble, “Wash it yourself then,” as he’s walking away.

He doesn’t say anything, so I think he didn’t hear me.

Then I feel his hand on the back of my neck, forcing me down toward the dirty water. There’s pasta and tiny pieces of ground meat floating on top. I take a breath and close my eyes. He holds me down until I start coughing. I inhale soapy water. It stings in my nose and throat. When he lets me up, I cough water into the sink. I cough so hard I throw up part of my dinner.

This morning, I woke up with my throat still stinging. I want to tell Mom about last night but I know it won’t do any good. The woman who owns this house, Faye, is our legal guardian. She used to date Mom’s dad, my Papaw, when Mom was a kid. Rick is Faye’s son. He came to live with us when he got out of prison.

Before he came, I asked my oldest brother, Sean, about him.

“Uncle Rick’s been in prison several years now,” he told me, “he tried to kill his wife, then tried to kill himself. The state police managed to crash his truck before he drove it off the cliff.”

Mom’s rings click against the window, and I glance at her face, a furious, red mask. I look around the interior of her new boyfriend’s car. It’s so long it feels more like a limo than a town car. That’s what Mom called it when she bragged about this new, rich guy, Bruce.

“Bruce is a big boss at his company,” she told us after the concert. “He’s very important and makes a lot of money. He mainly drives his company truck, so he lets me use his town car. My Oldsmobile is in the shop again.”

Mom goes through a lot of cars, and they’re always in the shop.

I don’t care about Mom’s boyfriends or how rich she thinks they are. She has a new boyfriend every time I see her. They never last. Faye says, “It’s because no man wants to raise a herd of kids that aren’t his.”

Mom slaps the window, and I jump.

She screams, “Get out of this goddamn car before I knock your teeth down your throat.”

I turn my head away from her, toward the house, and look into the kitchen window. I think about my sister, Faith, and how Rick takes her into his room some nights. Sometimes, she doesn’t come back out until the next morning. She almost never talks to me anymore. She lies on the couch most afternoons, reading her V.C. Andrews novels or sleeping.

I think about Sean. He’s never around anymore. He disappears for days and weeks at a time. I assume he’s with friends. I’m angry at Sean for leaving. It’s not fair that he doesn’t have to be here and I do.

My other brother, Dylan, likes it at Faye’s. His arms are only half the length they should be, and he only has three fingers on each hand. The State of California considers him disabled and pays Faye extra money to keep him. She gives Dylan whatever he wants. He has his own room next to Faye’s, while Sean, Faith, and I sleep on the floor in the living room.

I hear a loud, metallic clank and turn my head back toward Mom. She’s trying to force the door open. The car rocks back and forth as she yanks the handle. She quits after a few tries, then grabs a handful of her hair and squeezes. I think about a time in Sacramento, a few years ago, when Mom disappeared again, and CPS came to take us back to Faye’s.

We’re in a new apartment when Mom has one of her episodes—that’s what we call them. Her face turns red when she screams at us.

“There isn’t a person walking who had a worse childhood than me,” she says. “You should be grateful.”

Then there’s more screaming. She walks, almost runs, toward me. Her eyes wide and not blinking. She has a fistful of hair in both hands. She pulls so hard, her head jerks from side to side.

I drop to my knees and tuck myself between the wall and the couch. Faith is in Mom’s room, the only bedroom in the apartment, with the door closed. Sean stands in the living room, staring at the ground.

Later, maybe a few minutes, Mom lets her hair go and grabs her purse off the coffee table.

She says, “If I’m such a horrible mother, why don’t you go to the mom store and get yourself a new one,” as she walks toward the door.

Then she’s gone.

I don’t see her for a while, days or weeks.

The police come the day the lights stop working. I hear someone say Marysville. That’s where Faye lives. I don’t want to go to Marysville, so I hide under Mom’s bed. I lie on my stomach and watch the bedroom door. When I see black boots walking on the carpet in front of me, I cover my mouth.

The big cop drops to one knee and reaches his arms in to grab me. I bite his hand.

“Shit,” he says.

It doesn’t stop him from grabbing me. He squeezes my arm. I slap his hand and try to pull away, but he’s too strong. He rips me out from under the bed.

Later, I’m in a car. It takes me to Marysville.

We’re at Evelyn’s for a while—maybe weeks, maybe months. Mom calls a few times. She always says she’ll come get me but doesn’t show up.

Mom’s voice comes in muffled again at first, like she’s a thousand yards away. I blink my eyes a few times and look at her.

She says, “Open this door right now, or I’ll pick up one of these rocks and break the window.”

“Go ahead,” I tell her. “Rip me out of the car. When the social worker comes for her monthly visit, I’ll tell her the truth about everything. I’ll tell her what it’s really like living here and how you don’t care. I’m not staying here anymore. I’m leaving one way or another.”

Mom gives in and takes me with her to Bruce’s condo in Sacramento. Bruce is a large man with a deep voice, and I jump sometimes when he says my name. At the condo, I have a room to myself and don’t have to sleep on the floor. It’s the first time I haven’t shared a room with someone.

At night, shadows crawl off the walls, across the floor, and toward my bed. They hover over me and watch as I try to sleep. I pull the covers over my head and call out for my sister—forgetting she’s not here.

A week passes, then Mom gets a call, and we drive back to Marysville.

I look up through the backseat window. The sky is a blur. I don’t see rain or clouds. There should be stars, but there’s only darkness.

Bruce stops the town car in front of a short, gray building. Inside, I sit in a cold, plastic chair and hear the hum of an air conditioner kicking on. I should hear muffled talking or muted coughs, but it’s silent. The silence screams in my head, pressing in on me from all sides. Fluorescent lights flicker above me, and it’s hard to look up. I stare at my feet, dangling above the floor—linoleum, beige or white—then the smell hits me: sickness and antiseptic. It stings in my nose, and my eyes tear.

To my right, double doors swing open. My sister is somewhere beyond those doors. I look up to see a woman in pink scrubs enter the waiting room. She’s holding a clipboard with papers tucked into it. I think maybe she’ll talk to me, but she doesn’t. I watch her walk away and go back to staring at my feet.

Seventy-two hours later, they release my sister from the hospital, and Bruce says she can come to the condo too. When we get there, Faith goes straight to the room Mom says is now hers, and I don’t see her for a while. She only comes out to use the bathroom, and weeks go by before she speaks.

On the days Faith showers, Mom takes her to the therapy appointments CPS said are “legally required.” When they leave, I go into her room. There, I find a notebook on a nightstand next to a twin bed. Next to the notebook is Faith’s copy of Flowers in the Attic. She’s read it so many times the binding is loose, and pages fall out of it.

There’s not much written in the notebook. I stop reading halfway through the second page. Before I stop, I read how Faith hates her life. She wishes she didn’t have siblings and is angry at Mom for making her raise me and my brothers.

I don’t sleep for a long time after the night in the hospital. Every night, the shadows return to watch me sleep. Mom doesn’t believe my room is haunted.

“It’s all in your head,” she says.

Before bed, I vacuum the floor to smooth out the carpet. In the morning, I see footprints of different sizes and shapes, as if a group of people walked in circles around my bed all night. I avoid my room and begin sleeping in the bathtub down the hall. I do this for about a week, then Mom starts giving me Benadryl at dinner. The shadows keep coming, but on the pink pills, I’m too tired to care.

Mom invites Faith’s friend, Anna, to stay with us for a week. Soon after, I hear my sister laughing in her bedroom. The morning of Anna’s third day with us, they both come out and eat downstairs. By Anna’s last day with us, Faith is talking to everyone again.

Later, days or weeks, Bruce drives to Marysville to get Sean. They bring Freckles back with them too, and he doesn’t have to live on a chain in Faye’s front yard anymore. Dylan chooses to stay in Marysville.

***