Breaking Faith

  Breaking Faith

  It’s heroin. Brian holds the cache in his hand like a pirate grasps plunder. He walks back into the living room with a plastic sack of powder that looks like sifted dirt. In his other hand he’s got tinfoil, a lighter, and a small metal tube. A sober silence stretches between us as he lights the powder, which smells like burned barbecue sauce.

  He teaches me how to chase the dragon, and soon I feel Darkness lifting. It slips away, pushed by a surge of gentle euphoria. A warm flush swells on my skin, a dry mouth, and heavy extremities—like I’m not strong enough to lift my own arm—but I don’t want to. I just want to feel it; the calm and the peace, the stillness—even the nausea doesn’t bother me. Sleepiness takes me next, and I go on the nod, an alternately wakeful and drowsy state.

  I’m not sure if it’s later that day or the day after, but Brian brings out another fold. His lips draw back as he takes in the smoke. After that, we do it again.

  I hear people outside his door, hushed voices and footsteps, like ghosts floating in and out, but I don’t react, ’cause they are in the apartment next door. I don’t care anymore that Mrs. Lieberman has died and that no one else gives a shit about me, because I feel so relaxed and blissfully apathetic, wrapped up in my cozy little cotton ball of heroin.

  Time is fluid, elegantly slipping in and out of my cup of indifference as the animal in my gut leaves me for a while and I touch peace.

  It’s like when people tell me that everything is going to be okay—this is what it’s like; this is “okay.”

  I can’t remember eating or drinking or peeing. I can’t even remember if we have sex. Maybe it’s only the heroin making me feel a gentle orgasm, the absence of fear and loneliness, plus a physical feeling in which all muscles relax. My entire body feels like it’s being cradled in a giant, supple baseball glove, or like the feeling of getting into a cool, soft bed after having walked ten miles on thorns with a burning cross on my back.

  I chase the dragon again, the white curly smoke.

  Right now, my troubles seem far away, but what I don’t know is, they are poised to get much worse.

  Dedication

  To my supportive, loving husband, Nanni

  and my beautiful daughters, Julia, Alicia, Michaila, Chiara.

  You are so loved and valued…

  and

  To the Faiths I’ve met and have yet to meet…

  “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” —Bob Marley

  This novel is not only about a runaway teen on drugs, it’s about the suffering, bullying and trauma that the protagonist, Faith, has lived through, and why she is the way she is. Only in becoming aware of the baggage that some of us carry upon our shoulders, can we begin to understand why we do the things we do. Hopefully Faith’s story will help us to see beyond the “weirdness” as she calls it, and to treat our troubled peers with kindness and understanding.

  Prologue

  The two plainclothes police officers park their so-called inconspicuous black car, get out, and look up at the shabby roof of the town house unit across from ours. Spring rain clouds droop over the city like twisted gray blankets, releasing their first drops just as the pair reach the front door. One of them is young, with blond hair and a buzz cut. The older veteran cop’s a little paunchy with graying hair. Both are wearing light jackets, which cover their bulletproof vests.

  These images are the first memories I have, vividly seared into my mind, barely being four years old and tall enough to rest my chin on the windowsill. The memories remain with me to this day because I watched the whole thing go down from my upstairs bedroom window.

  The young one is the first to step on the landing and is reaching for the screen door when a discharge loud enough to rattle my window splits the air. A gaping hole is blasted through the front door. One round hits the pane above me and sprays me with glass. The cop with the buzz cut falls to the steps, dead before he hits the ground. I scream as blood trickles warmly into my eye—doors, windows, and shutters begin to slam shut around the complex.

  The veteran jerks back, shot in the left arm, but draws his gun fast enough to get a round off through the glass inlay and then throws himself over the railing onto some long forgotten decorative urns.

  The shooting stops. I keep screaming.

  I feel hands grab my shoulders, dragging me away from the window, throwing me down. Someone lies on top of me, shielding my face. I hear gun blasts and pops and now sirens in the distance.

  I keep screaming.

  Sinbad, in the house across the street (yes, his name was Sinbad, like the guy who sailed the Seven Seas), firing his semi-automatic at the two cops from the other side of the door, was higher than a kite on crystal meth. Sinbad gets shot right in the chest—at least that’s what all the kids in the neighborhood said afterward. I didn’t see it, because my mother had pushed me to the ground and had thrown herself over me.

  In the following months, I have to sleep with Momma because I wake up with night terrors. Darkness comes over me like a shroud and stays for a long time, and I think I’ll never feel happiness again. For a long time, I refuse to leave my mother’s side. I have headaches and my stomach hurts and I pee the bed. Momma takes me to a doctor, and he says that I should see a therapist, but it takes us three buses to get there. Momma and I go twice, and then she gives up and says she’ll help me grow out of it.

  Does anyone ever outgrow something like that? It may ebb and flow, but go away—nah, not thinking so.

  I chose to start my story here, because it is the pivotal point, the hinge in my door, the fulcrum in the balance; this is the beginning and the beginning of the end for me.

  Look, I’ll be truthful. I’m doing this because my counselor told me that if someone is hurting emotionally on the inside that it helps to write things down—it’s a kind of exercise, writing about your feelings and fears and stuff. Writing makes you feel better, I guess, because everything is right there in front of you, balls out in black and white.

  I guess now is as good a time as any to introduce myself; my name’s Faith Emily Hansen, and I’m eighteen years old. I have blond hair and brown eyes. I’ve got two half sisters: Destiny, the younger, and Constance, the older. And yes, we have nouns for names. I’ve wondered why that is and I suppose the logical person to ask would be my mother. I do have several theories, into which I have done a little bit of research.

  Our names, of course, were chosen by my mother—that was the easy part. Now here is where the research comes in: Constance’s name means “firmness of purpose” or “constant in character.” And in truth, Constance is stronger than any of us, and is unflinching in her goals, though I would argue that her character isn’t as “constant” as I would have liked it to be a couple years ago. But that’s for later.

  Destiny’s name has everything to do with belief in one’s future and one’s fate. That said, I can see where she has developed the grit to work toward her wishes for a better one. After all, I—her middle sister—was a perfect example of what not to be. And in spite of everything, she’ll be the first to tell you that she doesn’t believe in destiny or serendipity or whatever you call it—she insists that people make their own destiny. And with that, I agree wholeheartedly.

  And lastly, there’s me, Faith.

  Faith as a noun is packed with synonyms: commitment, dedication, loyalty…. The list goes on. Faith brings images of devotion and trust—that is me to a fault. But this is a two-parter. First, faith is a fault when too much loyalty and devotion can destroy you if the person or thing that you believe in is hurting instead of helping you. Second, lack of belief and confidence when it comes to
yourself can really mess with you. I suck at living up to my name with respect to that.

  I believe in the deepest depths of my heart that Momma named us after qualities she thought she didn’t have, strengths that were necessary to be able to cope with all the crap that life threw at her.

  Now, things weren’t so bad for her when Constance was born, but by the time me and Des were in the picture, I think she recognized her flaws. Maybe she thought that by naming her daughters after positive qualities, that somehow we would be given the grace to deal with being crapped on, metaphorically speaking of course, in ways in which she could not.

  But I’m jumping way ahead now. Let me back up a little and put things in perspective by giving you some necessary family background.

  I, Faith Emily Hansen, was born in Greenleigh, Ontario. I was raised in a redbrick row house on Danziger Crescent at the end of Delbert Street, with a blue shingled roof and a green door that had been painted over so many times it was tight in the doorjamb. As a kid, I remember squinting at our house from across the driveway in the worn and weary complex where we lived, and thinking it looked like someone had pieced together giant Legos to create cookie-cutter row houses.

  I lived with my mother, Lacey, and my grandmother, Dorothy—Dot, as everyone calls her. We lived as an almost normal family until my mother decided that she had some living to do elsewhere, when I was seven, my little sister, almost five, and my older sister, ten.

  Then it was just Gran and us three. I’ll admit that, at school, I referred to Gran as my mother sometimes, because I didn’t want the other kids to know Mom left us. I prayed my classmates never found out, but of course, they eventually did.

  “Everything comes out in the wash,” my Gran would say. She was fond of using adages like that when she didn’t know what else to say.

  Allow me to confess that I always knew I was different—and I’m not just referring to the family structure in which I was raised. I mean, my mind worked differently. At home, I would cry a lot because I felt misunderstood and misjudged. And at school, I was a riddle to adults and other kids alike, just as I was a riddle to myself—even with sporadic counseling, I was still weird.

  I would blame it on me. Now I know better.

  At school, I tended to be morose and sullen and nervous and kept to myself. Contrary to my dark attitude, though, I would often hum while the teacher was in the middle of her lesson, which clearly distracted her. That didn’t mean I was happy. I hummed to help myself concentrate because I had too much going on in my head. Of course, she would tell me to stop and would admonish me for it, but I couldn’t help it.

  In addition to humming, I would sometimes tilt my chair onto the two back legs and fall over onto the desks behind me. The kids would laugh, but my teachers would look worried more than anything else. They would come and help me up and ask if I had hit my head. I would always say yes, even if I hadn’t—that was always good to get to go to the office for ice as a distraction.

  The office was an altogether different adventure. I had the office all figured out. I pegged the school secretary as a nasty piece of work not long after our first exchange—though now when I look back, she wasn’t really. Mrs. O’Grady meant well most of the time. And for the most part, she tended to humor me, unless I tested her patience, and then things got ugly.

  Maybe by now people are thinking they know what’s coming—my story is the quintessential example of a person who is the sum of all her experiences, and that if I didn’t have all these issues, I wouldn’t be the strong person I am. I wouldn’t be writing this so that maybe it would help out other kids who are messed up. And perhaps others would add that “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”

  And to this I would vehemently say, “That’s a load of shit.”

  Everyone wants to end up in a good place, the easiest and most effortless way you can get there. Those inspirational quotes are just something people say when other people are having a rough time and they’re not sure what advice to offer. Empty words are things I found most irritating when I was on my so-called journey—my journey in the Dark, fighting the demons of anxiety, drugs, and being on the bad side of mental health due to the pain and confusion caused by my emotionally immature mother and a random act of violence.

  Often in my “struggle,” I felt like what Gran called an old soldier. I don’t very much like to invoke the old-soldier metaphor, but in my case, it works well, having lost more battles in my life than I have won.

  Like I said, I don’t cling much to the power of sayings, but I do have one that got me through most days: “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” Bob Marley said that. This became my motto when I felt Darkness and fear growing inside me like a cancer.

  In my quieter moments of mapping my escape from rock-bottom and dreaming of feeling good about myself, finding the courage and will to talk to someone about the Darkness and my pain is what pulled me off of my own personal ledge. I still need to talk and talk and talk about everything and share my pain, and my talking helps others, and others talk and talk to me and give me their pain, and everything is shared and passed around, and when that happens and other people are carrying some of it for you, the toxic load in your core is lighter.

  Call it distraction, call it focus, call it a load of crap, but that worked for me.

  And now, as I take strides to maybe someday make the world a better place for me, I realize that no human being, no matter how tattered physically and emotionally, how weary of mind and shattered in soul, is unworthy of our consideration. In my heart, at times when the pendulum swings low, I’m still out there, shivering right along with them.

  And I keep writing—this is my ending and my beginning.

  Chapter 1

  Her full name was Lacey McKenna, then Lacey McKenna Tingley, and then just Lacey McKenna again. Lacey was my mother. Though she was consistently inconsistent in her mothering style, I knew, for the most part, that she loved me and my sisters. In fact, I always thought one of her deepest flaws was that she made us love her too much.

  The summer of my sixth year on planet Earth was an unbearably hot one. It’s over a year since Sinbad’s rampage, and I still have trouble sleeping because I see the same scene repeat itself each time I close my eyes. Basically, I fall asleep when I’m exhausted, or I sneak into bed with one of my sisters.

  My sisters and I all share the same room. It’s nighttime and the window is open to let in the humid, stifling air from the outside, to blend with the humid, stifling air inside. Open windows also let in the sounds of the night in our neighborhood, like the sounds from Wheelchair Louie’s house down the street; Louie has a steady stream of visitors at all hours of the day and night. One night in particular stands out among the many unforgettable moments in my life, because it’s the first time my mom unknowingly reveals that she has issues—and I don’t mean regular issues like being over protective or comparing us siblings unfairly or never being satisfied. I mean huge friggin’ issues.

  ...

  There’s a tear in the window screen. It’s been there for some time, but the duct tape comes off from the humidity, and Momma forgets to tape it over again—she forgets stuff a lot, and Gran refuses to pick up the slack because she says she’s already raised her family and isn’t about to raise her kid’s family, too.

  I’m having trouble sleeping again. My sisters are awake, too, because there’s dozens of mosquitoes buzzing around the room looking for the perfect opportunity to zero in on an exposed arm.

  Connie huffs out a breath.“I can’t sleep.”

  “Me either,” I say. Des shakes her head and continues to suck her thumb.

  “You wanna go to Mom’s room?” asks Connie, sitting up on her bed.

  “Let’s tell her we got bad dreams,” I suggest.

  “It’s not bad dreams, it’s mosquitoes, dumbhead,” Connie says. She
slides her legs over the side of the bed and stands up. I shrug and follow suit.

  Constance leads the way, as Constance always does, and pads down the hall, myself and Des in her wake.

  Mom’s door is ajar. Upon reaching it, Connie’s hand goes out behind her, and signals us to stop. She turns and mouths, “Listen.” There’s a soft but distinct sound—Mom is crying.

  I furrow my brow and wonder why she would be crying—does she have a stomachache or is she sick? I don’t hesitate. I open the door and say, “Mom?” I sidle past Connie, still holding Des’s hand, and walk to the bedside. “Are you crying, Momma?”

  “What are you guys doing up?” she asks, propping herself up on one elbow and trying hard to look natural.

  “There’s mosquitoes in our room,” replies Connie, angling her head. “Why are you crying, Mom?”

  “No reason,” she says as she pushes the sheet off her and swings her feet to the floor. “Sometimes adults just need to cry—for no reason.” She smiles as if this should be common knowledge to us kids, but her voice is too cheerful and shaky to be honest.

  We weigh her words—our skepticism on one side and the wish to believe on the other. We just stare at her, not knowing what to do.

  She breathes in deeply through her nose and out through her mouth several times, then hunches over and whispers to us, “Okay, enough of this. Are you ready to go on a mosquito quest?” Her smile cheers us up, and soon her crying is put on our mental back burner.

  “Yes!” Connie says.

  “Me too!” I don’t know what a quest is, but I assume by Connie’s reaction that it will be fun.

  “Shh, don’t wake Gran.” We nod. Waking Gran from a sound sleep would not be a good thing. “We need towels to use as our weapons against the mosquito army.” Mom tiptoes to the linen closet and gets a tea towel for each of us. “You start by swatting as many as you can, while I get the duct tape,” she whispers.