Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,19
I thought about going to bed alone, it felt like there was a monster in my chest clawing at me from the inside. I’d curl up as much as possible, and sometimes I hugged my pillow tight, but nothing soothed the deep pit that echoed inside. I desperately wanted it out, but every night it was persistent; it remained there. Now on my birthday, my first birthday in years without someone to snuggle me to sleep, I fought that feeling.
“Maybe you could stay?” I mumbled, looking at the floor instead of Jamie.
“No,” he said, almost laughing. He walked out the door without saying goodbye or happy birthday. I regretted asking.
I sat on the floor and called my dad. It was almost ten p.m., but I knew he’d still be up, watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC with his wife, Charlotte, like they did almost every night. I’d liked that about living with them. After Jamie kicked us out, I stayed at their place for a few weeks when I had nowhere else to go.
“Hey, Dad,” I said and paused. I didn’t know what to say; I needed him but could never say it. The secret language of my family was that no one ever spoke.
“Hi, Steph,” he answered, sounding a little surprised. I never called anymore. We hadn’t seen each other or talked since Mia’s birthday party three months earlier, even though he lived a few hours away. “What’s up?”
I took a breath in. “It’s my birthday.” My voice quavered a little.
“Oh, Steph,” he said, releasing a deep sigh.
We were both quiet. I couldn’t hear the TV in the background and pictured their dark living room, lit by the paused image on the screen. Maybe Charlotte had gone out for a cigarette. I wondered if they still didn’t drink wine on weekdays.
* * *
In the beginning, just after I left Jamie and took refuge with my dad, he watched me sit at his kitchen table late into the night, surrounded by piles of paperwork and court documents. I imagined that Dad was trying to make sense of what was happening in my life. All he knew was that I had no money, no home, and Mia was only seven months old. He had no idea how to make it better. He could feed me but couldn’t really afford to. The housing crash had already impacted his occupation as an electrician. It was 2008, and developers struggled with not having anyone to develop anything for. I’d tried to ease the burden of having us there by purchasing food for everyone with my food stamps. I made dinner or breakfast and tried to clean the house during the day—but I knew it wasn’t enough. I was asking a lot of Dad and Charlotte, who were already working hard to make ends meet. They’d moved to the property four or five years ago and had planned to live in a mobile home while they built their dream house. Then their property value dropped drastically; their plans vanished. Charlotte worked from home as a medical coder for insurance companies, something for which she’d had to go back to school to get a special certificate. Dad had been an electrician since he graduated high school.
Charlotte had purchased the trailer after her divorce, where she was left to raise her son alone on a modest salary. Dad, in his best effort to make it a home, built a large porch off the back, where they had about a dozen different bird feeders. Mia loved watching from the living room window as the blue jays swooped in to grab peanuts, flapping her arms and squealing with delight. Dad laughed whenever she did. “She looks exactly like you did when you were that age,” he’d say with a sort of awe.
One night, Dad came home late, his arms draped with bags of groceries. After putting Mia to bed, I sat in the living room with Charlotte, watching TV. Dad slipped outside to the hot tub with a bottle of wine. Over the noise of the TV, Charlotte and I began to hear what sounded like sobbing. A grown man sobbing. I’d never heard anything like it. Charlotte kept going out to the porch to check on him.
“Stop it!” I heard her finally yell. “You’re scaring your daughter!”
I’d never seen or heard my dad cry, yet, as a child would, I assumed it was my fault. I’d burdened him by asking for help at a time when he