Chapter One: Braces and Ice Cream
My first memory is soft around the edges, like a dream I’ve had a hundred times. I was still in diapers, sleeping in a crib, and my legs were wrapped in stiff metal braces. I don’t know exactly why—I was too young to understand—but my mother said I wore them for years. What I do remember, clear as moonlight, is how I used those braces to pry the bars of my crib apart. Not to escape, really. Just to explore.
One night, I woke long after everyone else had gone to bed. The house was dark and quiet, the kind of quiet that hums. I climbed out of my crib, walked down the hallway, and found my father sitting alone on the couch. He may have just come home from his weekend duty with the army reserves. I didn't say anything. I just climbed up beside him.
We didn’t turn on the lights. Just sat there, side by side in the glow of the television, eating ice cream and watching a movie. I don’t remember what we watched. I just remember the feeling—of being awake when no one else was, of being next to him, of cold ice cream and warm silence.
I didn’t know it then, but that moment would be one of the rare times I felt close to him.
Chapter Two: The Sound of Breaking
I was very young when my world became filled with violence and confusion. After my parents divorced, my mother began seeing a man—a child psychologist, of all things. He drove a red convertible and had a daughter a year older than me, who, like me, had been severely abused. The man was not only cruel to my mother, but I heard the fights through the bedroom door—the sounds of her pain, the shouting, the fear.
I don’t remember all the details clearly. The boundaries between what was safe and what wasn’t blurred so early. I do know that things were done to me at home, or at places that weren't home, that should never have happened. I was a child—too young to understand, but not too young to feel the weight of it.
Because I didn’t have the words or the understanding, I acted out in ways that mirrored the violence and dysfunction I witnessed. I didn’t know how to make sense of it, so I repeated what was done to me. Children don’t know the difference between right and wrong when they’ve been shown such a broken version of both. I carried the confusion and the pain out into the world, acting out publicly because that was the only way I knew how to communicate what was happening inside of me.
There’s a part of me that still questions everything about that time in my life. The memories are hazy, the truth buried beneath layers of self-doubt. But I know what I felt. I know what I saw. And I know what it turned me into—how early I learned to survive in silence, how I learned to scream without making a sound.
I went to a private preschool then—religious, I think, probably Catholic. It felt worlds away from what was happening at home, but it didn’t feel safe either. Not really. The building sat in a quiet neighborhood. I don’t remember much about the classroom, but I remember the playground vividly.
It had one of those towering metal slides that scraped your skin if you touched it in summer. I don’t know if it was actually enormous or if it just felt that way because I was so small. Underneath the slide were metal support poles, and I learned to climb them—tightly wrapping my legs around the cool metal, holding on like it was a secret. I didn’t understand what I was doing, not really, but I discovered early that certain kinds of movement created a sensation I liked. Sometimes I explored those feelings during nap time too, hidden in the hush of a room filled with sleeping children and soft adult footsteps. I think I might’ve gotten in trouble once, but the memory fades there.
I didn’t wear my leg braces anymore, but I still had thick orthopedic shoes that felt like cement blocks. They made my steps loud, solid. My mother told me that if boys bothered me, I should kick them in the shins as hard as I could. So I did—especially when they chased me around begging for kisses, cornering me like I was prey in some game I never wanted to play.
One boy took it too far, bullying me daily. He shoved, taunted, made my skin crawl. We were on that old metal merry-go-round every 70s playground seemed to have—the kind that could launch a kid into orbit if someone strong enough got it going. The air was thick with heat and metal and sweat, and the wheel groaned as we pushed it faster. He was there, of course, circling me like always, laughing too loud, too close.
Something in me snapped. Maybe it was all the days he shoved me into the dirt or called me names. Maybe it was the shoes—those heavy, orthopedic shoes, and the way they’d planted me to the ground like roots, unmovable. Maybe it was just that I was tired of being hunted.
As the merry-go-round spun, I waited until the timing felt right—until his hand reached out again to tap me or shove me or whatever he had in mind. And then I pushed.
Hard.
He flew off, arms pinwheeling, landing in the wood chips with a terrible crunch. I heard the break before I saw it—his leg twisted the wrong way, his face pale with shock.
Everything stopped. The wheel. The noise. My breath.
I don’t remember screaming, but someone must have. Adults came running. There was blood on his sock.
I got in trouble, of course. Not the kind where someone yells, but the quiet kind, where adults talk low behind closed doors and send you home early. My mother didn’t yell either. She looked at me, unreadable, and said, “Well. Maybe now he’ll leave you alone.”
And he did.
But I never forgot the sound. The way something so soft could snap so violently. The way being afraid can turn into something sharp and final. The way power feels, just for a moment, in your hands.
Chapter Three: The Yellow Truck and the Bike with Training Wheels
After the divorce, my dad was left with almost nothing. He started over in a bare one-bedroom apartment near the train tracks—just him, me on weekends, and the sound of distant freight cars at night. Eventually, he moved into an apartment complex off Baseline Road in Little Rock. He kept a blue boat on a trailer there—though I don’t remember us ever taking it out. Maybe it was a dream he never got around to chasing.
Then came the little duplex on South Oak Street. My dad lived in the larger two-bedroom side and rented out the smaller one-bedroom next door. He’d bought himself a bright yellow Toyota truck and furnished the living room in black pleather—shiny, tough-looking couches and chairs with matching tables and lamps shaped like chess pieces made from imitation wood. I remember thinking it looked grown-up and strange, like a bachelor’s version of elegance.
He made a space for me, though. He bought me a bedroom set—yellow and white with tiny flowers, a single bed, a dresser with a mirror, and a nightstand. It was made by Bassett, and I remember feeling like it was beautiful, like it was really mine. There was a bike, too—maybe for Christmas or my birthday—I can't remember which. It had training wheels at first, and then he taught me how to balance on my own.
The house was shaped like a rectangle, its long side facing the street, with a wide front porch where I practiced riding. I’d pedal back and forth after school, my world narrowed down to the rhythm of the wheels and the breeze against my face. My dad cooked dinner inside, and the warm smells would drift through the open kitchen windows. Every time I passed by, I’d catch a whiff of food and hear his voice call out with a smile:
“Was that a flash of lightning that just passed by me?”
It was the kind of love he knew how to give—small moments, quiet pride, and dinners that smelled like home.
Chapter: Amy's House, My Mother's House
My first best friend was named Amy. She lived across the street from my mother’s house on Markham Street in Little Rock. Her family had just moved down from Cincinnati, and everything about them seemed big and bright and new to me. Her father was a neurosurgeon—at least I think he was—and her mother stayed home, always seeming to be in the kitchen, always surrounded by the hum of life.
They were Catholic, much more than my mother ever was. I only remember going to church with my mom on Easter or Christmas. Amy's family went every week. Her mother once told me I came from a “broken home,” and though I didn’t fully understand what that meant, I understood the way she looked at me—softly, kindly, like maybe she felt sorry. She let me stay for dinner often, sometimes even breakfast or lunch on the weekends. No one seemed to mind.
Their house was the biggest I had ever seen, an old grand thing on the corner with a square lawn bordered by a stone wall just wide enough for a child to walk without falling—though I often did. The house had a library, a formal dining room, a sunroom, and a kitchen that always smelled like something wonderful. Upstairs, all the girls shared one giant room and the boys another. Amy and I played dress-up in her corner of the room and got in trouble once for tearing one of her older sister’s fancy dresses. But most of the time, we just laughed and ran and made our own world inside that house.
There was always food on the table at Amy’s—laid out in proper dishes, at regular times, with everyone gathered around like it was a celebration just to eat together. It amazed me. My family didn’t eat that way. My mom didn’t cook like that. I wasn’t hungry, not really, but the way meals felt like events in Amy’s house—like rituals—it made me feel something I didn’t have a name for yet. I just knew I liked being there.
My mother had bought a place just across and slightly up the street from Amy's. It sat at the top of a steep hill, a pale yellowed two-story with weathered white trim and ivy that never quite gave up its hold. The windows were tall and narrow, their glass warped slightly with age so the world outside looked wavy and uncertain, like a dream trying to remember itself. It was an enormous thing, the kind of house that must have cost a fortune to build back in its day. It had once been a single-family home, but by the time she bought it in 1974, it had been divided into two apartments—one upstairs, where we lived, and one downstairs that she rented out.
There was talk that it may have once belonged to the Dillard family—the same Dillard's behind the department stores—but I can’t say for sure. That was just something my mother said once, in passing.
The entrance to our place was in the back, not the front. Markham Street was busy, so you had to turn onto the side driveway and follow it around to the gravel parking area behind the house. The stairs up to our apartment were steep and narrow, with wooden steps and a black iron railing. At the top was a small landing—just big enough for the two of us to stand side by side—and the back door.
When you walked in, you entered a long rectangular room that stretched across the back of the house. My mother used it for storage mostly, but she had a round table set up at the far end that she used sometimes for my birthday parties.
Off to the left was the kitchen, though the door had been removed at some point. It was large and unmistakably 1970s, with matching avocado-green appliances—a stove, a refrigerator, and a vent hood. The floor was vinyl, though I can’t remember the pattern. A long counter ran along the left wall, with upper and lower cabinets, and a sink beneath a small window. She tucked a little round table into the corner at the end of the counter. Next to that was a metal shelf with her Radar Range on top, and kitchen towels and odds and ends below.
From the kitchen, you passed into a long, narrow living room. My mother had a rust-colored sectional along the outer wall, with matching end tables and those tall ceramic lamps that had thin painted lines in pink and rust, their cream-colored shades casting a soft yellow glow in the evenings.
The only bathroom sat off to the right of the living room, and on either side of it were two bedrooms.
Mine was toward the back. My mother had bought me a French Provincial bedroom set with a queen-size canopy bed, a dresser with a mirror, and two matching nightstands. The bedding was soft and frilly, pale in color, to match the canopy. The head of the bed rested against the back wall, and I had an old console stereo system set up too—the kind from the 60s, heavy as furniture and meant to stay in one place once it was put there.
There was a window to the right of my bed, and I remember spending a lot of time just staring out of it. The house next door was close—we shared the driveway—but I never met the people who lived there. Still, I wondered about them, about what their lives might be like.
On the other side of the bathroom was the second bedroom. My mother told me that when we first moved in, I slept in there on bunk beds. That room had a connecting door to her bedroom, but I don’t remember us ever using it. I remember the bunk beds, vaguely. But not sleeping in them.
She said I cried every night for six months straight after the divorce. That I cried for my father. He was the safe place. My mother, to me at that age, was danger. When I cried for him at night, she would come in, drag me off the top bunk, and beat me for crying for him.
I remember how lost I felt. How sad.
My father had weekend custody, and I clung to those weekends. But when he brought me back, I would cry and scream and wrap my arms around him, begging not to be left. No one ever asked why.
At the front of the house, on the street-facing side, was my mother’s bedroom. You could tell it used to be the living room. It had a fireplace on the right wall and French doors draped with sheer, cream-colored curtains that made delicate pleats where they hung on impossibly thin copper rods. Her king-size bed faced the street, placed in the middle of the wall just to the right of the French doors, with nightstands on either side. There was a closet to the left, and next to that, a door that opened into one of my favorite secret places—a grand, hand-carved wooden spiral staircase. It descended into the downstairs apartment’s porch, but to me, it was its own world: a twisting, magical place that had been sectioned off like a quiet sentinel keeping watch. I loved that staircase. I spent hours there playing when my mother would let me, touching each carved banister like it was part of a story only I could read.
In front of her bedroom was the sunroom—once a porch, now enclosed in glass. It had its own set of French doors and windows on three sides, each at least six feet tall, flooding the room with light that softened in the late afternoon. Against the front wall, facing the bedroom, my mother had placed a dark wood-framed sofa with yellow corduroy cushions. To the right of the sofa sat her stereo and record player. To the left, a large fish tank full of slow-moving fish and colored gravel. I remember watching our cat stare at them for hours—always calm, but with the kind of frustration that never turns into action. On the inner wall, just beside the tank, was her sewing machine—a heavy model from the ’60s built into a wooden desk with curved, attached legs. When it wasn’t in use, it folded into the desk, vanishing into a smooth surface perfect for cutting fabric or stacking piles of unfinished projects. It came with a matching chair with a gold cushion that lifted to reveal hidden compartments filled with threads, bobbins, and the quiet weight of my mother’s careful plans.
That sunroom became my refuge. I’d sit there with my little red cassette player, the kind that could run on batteries or be plugged into the wall and listen to “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” while watching sunlight pattern the floor through the tall windows. There was something about the quiet industry of that room—the sewing machine waiting to be flipped up, the fish swimming their slow loops, the cat in her vigil—that felt like safety, or at least something close to it.
Every room in that house had a memory sealed inside it, like a jar put away and forgotten on some high shelf. And even though the house changed over time—new curtains, old furniture gone, fresh paint layered over chipped walls—it never stopped feeling like a container for ghosts. Some gentle. Some not.
