The Home for Troubled Families

Twelfth in a series on my West Virginia childhood and Appalachian exile.

My mother remarried even before my father did, to a man a year younger than her. The ceremony, held less than seven months after the divorce, was unremarkable and exists in half-memories now fused with images someone took that day with a Polaroid camera. I’m not sure anyone attended except the officiant and legal witnesses. I have no recall of a reception or honeymoon.

“I was embarrassed to wear high heels with your father,” my mother said to me that morning, getting dressed. “They made me taller than he was.”

This new man, however, had three inches of height on my father. In this way, she implied a certain progress from husband to husband.

My stepfather’s prior marriage had likewise just ended. A few years later, looking through scrapbooks at his mother’s house, I would turn the pages backward from known history to find photos of not only the previous bride, whose name and face were by then known to me, but another, even earlier wedding, which seemed to make my mother at least his third wife. When his mother saw which pictures I was asking about, she took the album away. He never spoke to me about that early marriage.

It was one thing for my father to move out; it was another entirely for my stepfather to be grafted onto our family. We’d seemed sufficient as a unit without him. It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother might want to remarry.

After the wedding, we relocated for a time to a low brick house on the edge of a vast field at Hall Acres, a compound on the south side of town. The place came with his job as executive director of a Christian charity in town.

Though it lacked the gothic eeriness of the house on the hill, our home at Hall Acres was no more normal. The director’s residence sat at one end of a huge field on the grounds of the local juvenile detention center, with its loops of concertina wire. Closer to the main road sat the building euphemistically known as the Home for Troubled Families.

At the time, the charity he ran owned the whole lot. Before I finished elementary school, the state of West Virginia would acquire, demolish, and rebuild the juvenile detention area, folding it into the official prison system.

Nestled into a hillside out of direct view of the barbed wire, the house seemed dark and spartan. Compared to the house on the hill, only one story and a basement surely meant we had traded down. The main redeeming feature of the place was a small playground down a slope from the rear of the house.

Though we were still at liberty to wander, my brother and I had nowhere to go beyond the playground. Our television watching was restricted again. We began to sneak unapproved programs at odd hours when left alone in the house.

Like my mother, my stepfather had two children of his own from a prior marriage: a toddler daughter and a son who had just turned one. They stayed with us every other weekend. As far as I was concerned, their visits marked an improvement on the sibling front.

My brother’s interests had begun to diverge from my own, in part because the world expected different things from us. Driving our separation deeper, my brother had also started selling me—at a steep markup—gadgets he’d bought at G.C. Murphy with his allowance of fifty cents a week. I fell for it every time, and with each discovery of his profiteering, demanded a refund. But I remained too small to enforce restitution.

Having a new brother and sister who were years younger to boss around was a delight. My stepsister had long, dark hair that I liked to braid with ribbons into what I imagined as warrior headdresses. My stepbrother had a round face with eyes like dark coins.

We made messes in the basement and often got in my stepfather’s way upstairs. When he was in a bad mood, he haunted the edges of the room. If either of his children did something that made him unhappy, he shifted into motion, pulling them upright by one arm and belittling them as they dangled. I felt ashamed to witness their punishment, because they were small, and because they cried.

I was no better behaved than they were and probably worse, which is to say that I was a child. I talked constantly. My mother had told me repeatedly that I could be a handful. “You are just a lot,” she said, while reminding me that her teacher had taped her mouth shut the first day of first grade—which I took to mean that she had once been a lot, too.

At home and at school, my nickname was Missy. But at Hall Acres, my stepfather started to address me as “young lady.” Though he smiled while saying it, I understood it wasn’t an endearment. His animosity confused me. I couldn’t grasp what I’d done to provoke it, and could see no path to making things right.

Now that we no longer lived in our own house, I had a physical sense of being on his territory. I tried not to look at him directly but watched him out of the corner of my eye. At first, he didn’t speak to me often. Then his unhappiness with his own children slowly drifted toward me, as if I’d acquired some visible stain that drew his attention.

He punished them for things I’d done with them, but he didn’t punish me. Everyday life took on a strange aspect, as if I were swimming in something solid.

I spent more and more time alone with a set of rainbow pens drawing endless circles of Spirograph designs or raiding the box of old books my brother’s homeroom teacher had given him at the end of the last school year. I burned through all of them, from two volumes of Cherry Ames: Student Nurse to The Three Investigators and The Boxcar Children—each one with the teacher’s name, Judy Meeks, written in a looping cursive on the endpapers.

We continued to sleepwalk through the rituals of our former life. My mother found a small outpost of the public library nearby. We couldn’t walk there, but we drove a few times. More often, I visited the library at school.

Along with books I borrowed and returned, there was one I checked out over and over—a short-story collection that came to me by chance. I’d spent weeks rereading a book of Greek myths with a cover showing Apollo’s horses and chariot framed against a blazing sun. Asked for something similar, the school librarian gave me Monster Tales.

Horror stories were new to me, and this book was filled with them. There were werewolves, vampires, and a count in a castle, but the first story was the one that rattled me. A boy who trespassed on a ancient burial site found a bird-human mummy and brought it home. There was an illustration of the boy cradling the monster corpse before he knew it was still alive. It had slashes of ink for leg bones and empty pits in its skull for eyes.

Warned by someone who knew better, he hid it in his basement anyway. When the boy later took his unhappy dog downstairs, the mummy had vanished. Searching in the dark for the creature, he was separated from the dog. He heard the sound of bones breaking just before the story ended.

I’d never read a story in which the main character was marked for death, let alone one involving a child. The story had simply stopped, with the worst yet to happen. Part of me felt I would be trapped there with the boy forever, with no idea how to proceed. I couldn’t keep myself from returning to the basement again and again, imagining some new ending would appear.

With all the contours of my new world not yet apparent, I could not accept that our old life had ended. Surely, I thought, we had somehow gotten lost, and only needed to find our way back. But each time I opened the book, the blank page of the future sat there, mute.

You can read another story in this series about my childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter on my About page.