A Better Home

The wind bit at me as I stood within the confines of my coat, the winter sky cast a dim grey light across the world in the early morning. I hadn’t woken up this early since I was eighteen and was forced to. So standing in front of this house, this horrible, evil, horrendous, house at this hour hit a very specific part of my heart that I have had hidden away behind lock and key since I last saw this place. 

I know logically that Ms. Gladys is long dead, that was the last time any of us kids spoke, we all wanted to pass the good news along to the only other people that would understand our weeping and the weight that lifted from all of our shoulders. Yet despite spitting on her grave myself I still stood terrified that she would come rushing from the front door smiling at the neighbors, and hate returning to her eyes as soon as they fell onto my small frame. I know logically that Ms. Gladys was just an evil woman but why did she hate us kids so much.

I was removed from her care when I was twelve but that didn’t stop the nightmares that more than a decade in that house had caused. I don’t have a lot of memories from foster homes I lived in, they were a blur of fighting tooth and nail for survival and never learning how to trust. Most of those foster parents weren’t outright abusive as much as just neglectful, but I had survived worse, much much worse. 

So I got under the table jobs on the bad side of town and worked my ass off, there might have been some more illegal activity but when you’re a teenager and have to pay for everything but housing with five dollars an hour work then you do what you have to to stave off your stomach turning against you and trying to digest itself. In the bad times when I needed new shoes or refused to move anything from the megar savings I had collected I had to pickpocket or shoplift to get some food.

 In the darkest times when I didn’t think there was a way out at all I met up with a local dealer who had been trying to get my budding breasts to sell for him since I left Ms. Gladys, he had finally convinced me that if I didn’t want to be hungry anymore his crew was the only option. I was with them for 2 years.

Ms. Gladys prided herself on her ability to break her kids down to nothing. She had fostered over 300 kids in total before she was finally shut down for selling weed to some of her druggie friends and was sent to jail for five years. All of them were monsters who had destroyed so many lives of innocent kids who had the shit luck to be placed in her house, her more than anyone and yet they never charged her with anything but Distribution of Marijuana. At least that was a felony which meant even after she got out she wouldn’t be able to foster anyone else. I was the last of the kids to be placed in a new home.

I glanced over my shoulder and spotted a few of the other kids standing around. A few stood by themselves like me but most stood with significant others, a couple even stood with children. As the clock ticked closer to the end time all of us kids stepped forward in sync, we all grasped onto one another. Hands tightened around others and crying faces were buried in an almost strangers shoulder. 

Even the ones that had known each other didn’t anymore, we’d all been torn apart from each other by time, space, and not wanting to remember the way we were raised. But there we stood bonded to people we had nothing in common with other than this house and that woman. The group of us ranged in age from people in their sixties to the ones who were little when she was sent away barely reaching their mid-twenties. People with grandkids, kids working their way through college, kids who had never gotten past the pain and had track marks littering their icy arms. 

The wrecking ball swung through the second story, sending scraps of rotted wood soring. Our group, the group of kids that were broken in this house, I would guess about a hundred of us, stood and watched this house ,that had been haunting us and haunted by us, be torn down to nothing bigger than a pile of splinters and rusty nails. And then the last of those dark memories were smashed to bits, this house and Ms. Gladys will die with the last of us. 

Slowly people began breaking off from the group. Going back into the arms of their spouses or families or the sweet embrace of escape that left those tracks. I stood there the longest, the kids that knew me gave me sad smiles and pats on the shoulder as they went off, back into lives. I kept standing staring at the demolished home long after everyone else had left until I heard a soft voice call out my name. 

“Sammy, baby, are you ready to go home now?” My wife asked as she slipped an arm around my waist. She wiped the tears away from my face, kissed me quick and warned me of the incoming tornado of kids that were ten steps behind her.

I turned just in time to catch our son who had a habit of throwing himself into my arms, I spun him around once before setting him gently back on the floor. The twin girls that we had just recently finalized the adoption of tugged on their big brother's hand begging him for the candy they claimed he had on him, he slipped them each a lollipop before shooing them off. 

Behind the crowd of our kids who couldn’t for the life of them sit still stood a twelve year old girl, Heather, holding her arms tightly and glancing around, not trusting this new location. She thought we were sending her to a different foster home, a terrifying thought since she’d only just started to settle in with us. I placed my hand softly on her shoulder before telling the rest of the kids to race back to the car with their other Mom so we can go get breakfast.

“Why are we here?” Heather asked, nerves obvious in her voice.

“This was my biological mother’s house. She was a horrible, mean woman who loved to hurt her foster kids. So me and a bunch of kids that she did those bad things to came here to see it get knocked down, it’s gonna be rebuilt into a group home where kids are gonna be well taken care of.”

“How do you know that they’ll be taken care of?” Her voice was quiet but firm, she had been in a foster home before.

“Because I’m the one who’s gonna run it. The kids who live there will be just as well loved as you and all of my other kids.”

Heather gave me a small smile and her small hands grasped around mine. We walked to the car and got ready with our family.