Chapter 35
Adriana couldn’t believe they blocked the bathroom with cans, bottles, boxes, and cellophane wrap. Didn’t they have human needs? Weren’t they concerned about bodily functions? Evidently they were not concerned enough to keep their gas to themselves.
Cindy was still passed out on the couch.
Adriana felt desperate. Her bladder was completely full. It crowded all the other insides of her. She felt like she couldn’t even move without risking an accident.
Besides that, she was cold, hungry, and altogether neglected in this messy mobile home. Just who were these adults? Where did they get the idea that they knew how to care for children? They could barely care for themselves.
Adriana pulled on her binds, but the rope was still tight around her wrists.
She used to have a problem wetting her bed at night when she was first placed in foster care. She had felt so out of control: separated from her father and her school, in an unfamiliar house with strangers, feeling constant pain from her leg stump healing, struggling to learn to get around on crutches, feeling helpless and in need of others.
The bladder thing had become an embarrassment. Other foster children laughed in the morning when they saw her stained sheets. They called her a baby, saying she needed diapers, pointing at her, making comments like, “Eeuw! You stink.” They would hold their noses as they walked by her and called her a one-legged freak.
The foster mother at that time, Mrs. McGill, wasn’t very nice either. At first she was tolerant, but after a few weeks she laughed with the other five children and told Adriana she brought it on herself for not getting up and using the bathroom. Her husband backed her up. She told Adriana that the children’s comments were a natural consequence for bad behavior.
As an additional consequence, each morning, Adriana had to pull off her sheets, take them to the laundry room, start the washing machine, and stand in the corner for 20 minutes until the sheets were done. Then she would transfer them into the dryer and start it. The foster mother would avoid Adriana for the rest of the morning. It made her feel so dirty and ashamed. She really did want to control her bladder; her life was just so chaotic.
Looking back, she saw that the bedwetting was a sign of how she felt inside.
Now she knew how to control her bladder and would not pee in her underpants, getting her skirt all wet with that sickening smell. She would hold it in.
But she did hope somebody would come along to help. Maybe Cindy would wake up and untie her so she could go to the bathroom, somewhere. Maybe they had another one in a different part of the mobile home. She would even go outside in the bushes if she had to.
Cindy murmured. It sounded tormented, with occasional high whines.
Adriana wished she had opened the box. She didn’t care anymore what happened to her if she opened it. She just wanted to see the bad adults suffer. Something was in the box that they couldn’t stand. If they couldn’t stand it, it was good enough for Adriana.
But now, the box was surrounded by much of the contents of the room. Cupboards, drawers, storage cabinets were all open from the storm of arms that had frantically collected things to stack around the box.
The place was really a mess.
Her father had also kept a messy house. She was held responsible to clean up, and sometimes it made her gag because of the stench from growths in the kitchen sink after a week of piled dishes and the rotting food in the refrigerator. Kitchen floors with old chunks of steak, peas, spilled soup, bathrooms with spiders, ants, dirty toilet bowls, showers with moldy tubs, soap scum on the walls. Her father wanted her to keep all these things clean, just as he had wanted mother to keep them clean before she fled from his abuse.
As anger rose inside her, Adriana felt hot and the room seemed to turn red. She was so mad at him that she felt like him—his rage rising inside her now.
How could he have been so stupid? How could he have expected so much from a little girl? Now that she was older, she knew more about her personal rights and how he had violated them, how his expectations of her were so wrong. She wasn’t supposed to have bruises and red marks on her body from his fists. She had personal boundaries, she had feelings, and these were supposed to be respected.
She learned this from her social workers, her therapist, and her foster parent, Jenny. But she had never known this with her father. Back then, she believed his anger was normal, that it was supposed to be unleashed on her, and that she deserved it because she wasn’t a good girl. She thought her mother left because she was a bad four-year-old girl. She knew different now. It was her father who was a bad man, and she hated him.
This rage didn’t help her bladder. There wasn’t room for both inside her tummy, so she quieted the rage by focusing on a beautiful place: the green field behind her house with the boy next door, Johnny Daggermouth. They used to run—she had two legs then—through the high grass and leap over logs, spilling into bushes, batting dandelions, watching the white seeds floating through the air.
When thoughts of her idiotic father crept back in, she drove them away by recalling times with her mother reading Dr. Seuss books. Those times were special because she was alone with her mother, without father’s craziness around, and her mother was always so calm.
Cindy tossed and turned in the booth, slapping the seats with her hands, kicking at the air.
Adriana wondered what demons her friend fought.
And where were the adults? She didn’t really want them back, but she needed them to ask if she could use the bathroom. She seemed to be getting fuller and fuller, if that were possible.
She moved onto her side to try to lessen the heaviness inside her, but that made it only worse. She pulled on the elastic band of her skirt, trying to loosen it. She wouldn’t let her bladder go all over herself. Adriana was determined to hold it in, no matter how terrible these adults were at caring for children.
She closed her eyes. She concentrated on making a lock around her bladder. She turned the key so nothing could escape and pictured the key being placed in her skirt pocket.
Adriana heard the door and opened her eyes.
Cindy’s mother entered cautiously, eyes fixed on the prison that held the box. Her step livened after seeing that all was intact. She carried a paper bag.
She went over to shake Cindy awake. There was a gleam in the mother’s eyes that Adriana hadn’t seen before. She sensed it was the wrong time to ask if she could please use the bathroom.
It appeared as though Mary were almost happy. Out of the paper bag, she pulled four spray-paint cans: blue, pink, red, and purple.
Purple was Adriana’s favorite color, purple like the flowers in the field she used to run through with Johnny Daggermouth, like the purple blackness of the sky shortly after sunset, like the color her feet used to turn when they walked in the pond by the school.
Cindy was groggy. “What is it, Mom? I’m so tired.”
“Come on, sweetie. We have an art project.”
Adriana loved art. She wondered what this woman could create.
Cindy yawned. “Art?”
“Well ... sort of. Come on, let’s sit beside your friend.”
“Okay. What are we going to make?”
“Come.” She led Cindy to sit beside Adriana, and handed Cindy the red and pink spray cans. “Take off the caps, like this. Shake them up a bit.” Cindy followed her example.
“Where are Adriana’s cans?”
“She is the canvas.”
“I don’t understand.”
Adriana’s breath stopped.
“Here, I’ll show you.” Mary took the purple paint and sprayed it on Adriana’s bare leg, making two stripes.
Adriana quickly recoiled her leg. She felt a cool feeling where the paint was drying.
“Now you try.”
With her leg drawn up into her stomach, Adriana’s bladder seemed to be filling into her chest.
“I don’t know, Mom. This doesn’t seem right.”
“Is that what your bitch foster mother taught you? You’re back with me now, and you need to trust me. The state isn’t going to care for you anymore. They gave up.”
“But Adriana is my friend.”
“I am your mother,” she said, stressing each word. “I love you more than anyone else.”
“I know. But Adriana doesn’t look like she likes this.”
“It’s okay. She doesn’t matter. She’s a freak of nature. Look at her.” Mary chuckled. “One leg, weak, pathetic. We can’t have weakness like this around, not inside us or outside. We need to get rid of it.” She took the blue can, pulled down the top of Adriana’s blouse, and sprayed a spot on her bare chest.
Adriana kept her eyes open too long and some vapor stung them. She closed them tightly, squeezing tears out.
“Look at her. Doesn’t she look funny? See how she squirms and cries. Such a wimp. You don’t need her as a friend.”
Adriana blinked her eyes open.
The mother took Cindy’s hand in hers and positioned it so that the sprayer was directed at Adriana’s belly where her bladder was screaming and hissing and boiling. “Go ahead. I’ll help you start.”
“It doesn’t feel right.” Cindy’s forehead was worried with wrinkles. “Please, let’s just paint the wall or a paper.”
“Sometimes we have to do things that don’t feel right. We just have to do them anyhow. Life is tough, and we have to learn to do what’s necessary.”
The mother pushed down Cindy’s index finger on the spray button. A shot of pink colored Adriana’s white blouse over her stomach. Adriana felt embarrassed and humiliated. The worst thing about it was this was happening right in front of her best friend.
“No, Mom. She doesn’t like this.”
“Some people aren’t going to like what you do. That’s tough shit. You have to do it anyway. Show Mother you love her.” Mary’s smile cracked open her mouth, exposing bent, yellow teeth inside. “Do it.”
“It’s not right.”
Cindy’s mother leaned down and burped into Cindy’s face. Adriana could swear a dark shadow passed from Mary’s mouth into Cindy’s.
The girl’s worried forehead smoothed. She looked different, colder.
Mary said, “Go ahead. It’s all right. It’s for the best.”
Cindy hesitantly brought the can back over Adriana’s belly and gave it a pink blast. She frowned and quickly set it on the floor. The mother burped into Cindy’s face again. “She’s worthless, Cindy. It’s okay to do this to her.”
Cindy brought the can over Adriana’s belly again and gave another pink shot, longer this time. She let out a scary laugh, part nervous and part delight.
Adriana’s leg shook. The pressure inside her bladder became too much to bear but she held it anyways. It was as good as sealed and locked.
The mother and Cindy both sprayed. Adriana closed her eyes tightly. They went all over on her hair, arms, chest, and leg, laughing. It was cold and made Adriana shiver. The binds dug painfully into her skin as she resisted them. A horrible emptiness rose within her. All at once, she felt the scorn of her old foster mother’s eyes, the foster children laughing at her bladder problem, the bullies at school teasing her about her missing leg, her teachers’ pity for her, her father putting her down—she was a freak, an outcast. She didn’t belong. She didn't fit in anywhere.
She felt like dying.
Warmth spread in her underpants, the only warmth in the hurricane of cold paint, and she knew what it was. It puddled on the carpet underneath her. She wouldn’t open her eyes now, even if Mary and Cindy stopped.
“Look, honey,” the mother giggled. “She peed her pants! What a loser!”
Adriana heard Cindy laughing, a terribly tormented laugh, then breaking into crying.
“What’s wrong?” the mother accused.
“We hurt her.”
“You just made her true nature come out. She’s a pathetic weakling.”
“That’s a lie,” Cindy cried. “You’re lying.”
Mary’s scream burrowed into Adriana’s spine.
Mockingbirds took flight outside the mobile home.
Adriana tried to get away too, tried to be somewhere else, but the scream wouldn’t release its hooked claws from her bones.
After it silenced, she tried to drift deep into herself, away from the horror of the scene, but she heard her friend being dragged on the floor, whimpering, and the door slamming. From another room, she heard Cindy yell, “No. I don’t like the dark. Please not there. Please.”
Adriana needed to get away from all this, so amidst her shivering, skinny, deformed body, she managed to go into a deep place inside herself where she couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel, couldn’t see, where the horrors around her couldn’t reach.