She was on the phone again.

"Mo-om . . ." my voice sounded whiney, even to my five year old ears. She had been on the phone for almost an hour and I was thirsty.

"Suzanna! Can't you see I'm busy?" She turned away from me. "Oh, it's nothing important. Just my daughter." She started twirling the phone cord around a perfectly manicured finger and laughed. "Oh Evelyn, I cannot believe you did that!" Her lips twisted up, not looking like a smile to me as much as it did a snarl. She sat with her back to me on the arm of the leather armchair she had made Dad buy only a few months previous. It was part of a set that was meant to match the hardwood floors. The couches were creamy; the floor was a golden brown. I didn't see how that matched but Mom said it did, so it must have.

I could feel my lip quiver, but I couldn't cry. If she saw me crying . . .

"Woozie Suzie!" Sam called from the kitchen. I followed his voice and snickered when I saw him, my tears quickly forgotten. He'd climbed on a chair dragged over from the table and had gotten the Ovaltine can down from the cupboard.

"Mom's gonna get mad at you." I said, looking over my shoulder to the living room, where I could still hear her talking on the phone.

"She won't get mad. I'm helping her. I 'm gonna be your waiter." He grinned, revealing the missing tooth in front that had fallen out the day before.

Sam wasn't much older than me. There were two months out of every year where we were the same age. Dad said it would be like that our whole lives. "Did she say you could help?" I asked. Sometimes Mom didn't like it when we helped. There was still a yellowed bruise on my hip from the last time I got caught helping.

As he climbed off the counter, his foot accidentally bumped the can of Ovaltine. It landed on the floor, popping the plastic lid off, and spilling the chocolate powder everywhere. I held my breath. Sam froze half way off the counter, his legs dangling over the edge. We waited.

She was still laughing on the phone and hadn't heard the can crash to the floor. Sam and I moved quickly. I opened the bottom drawer where Mom kept all the kitchen towels and tried to reach the tap to the kitchen sink to get the towel wet. Sam took it from me and tried to jump up to turn it on, but was too clumsy out of sheer terror. He couldn't reach it either.

"I'll g-g-g-get it d-down-s-s-stairs," he stuttered. He only stuttered when he was really scared. Dad said he'd grow out of it. Mom said he was stupid and that people didn't grow out of being stupid. Sam ran to the back of the kitchen to the stairs. While he was gone, I started scooping the pile of powder into my hands and putting it back in the can as fast as I could. That was when I heard her high heels clicking on the tile floor behind me. I froze.

"What are you doing?" she roared. "I thought I told you to wait!"

I shrunk back into the counter at the same time Sam reached the top of the stairs. He dropped the wet towel. His eyes went wide as mine squeezed closed. She was hurting me again.

* * *

It was almost an hour later when Sam crept into my room. His eyes were still red from crying, even though it wasn't him she'd been hitting. I remembered hearing him whimpering over my own cries.
"Are you hurt much?" he asked, sitting on my bed and looking at me to check for visual damage.

I shrugged, setting my jaw. "Not much," I lied. I was almost six and I needed to learn how to be brave.

"I'm so sorry, Suzie."

I shrugged again. "I'm okay."

"But it was my fault."

I had no response to that. It wasn't really his fault. He was just trying to get me a drink of chocolate milk. But she might not have known we were into stuff if he hadn't kicked the can over. I wasn't dumb enough to be mad at him though; it was just one of those things.

"I don't get it," he said. "If I hit you, I get in trouble, but she doesn't get in trouble when she hits you."

"Moms don't get in trouble for anything," I said.

"Maybe if we told Dad . . ." We both knew that was a dumb idea. We'd seen her throw things at him too. And he knew what she was doing to us when he was gone. He just couldn't stop her. Sam put an arm around my shoulder and I snuggled into him, feeling his chin rest on top of my head.
"We should run away," Sam said.

"Where would we go?"

"Where do you want to go?"

"California," I said.

"Why?"

"It's as far away as we can get. Really Sammy, It is on the other side of the country. I saw it on the map Dad hung on his wall. We could live on the beach and eat seashells for breakfast."

Sam giggled. "Nobody eats shells. They're too crunchy."

"How do you know?"

"We learned about shells in school. They're crunchy and they don't taste good."

"They would if I made them," I declared.

"You can't make 'em. I'm the waiter, not you."

"Waiters don't cook food; they just bring it to you when it's cooked."

He thought that over a minute and then finally sighed. "Maybe we shouldn't run away."
We both fell silent until we heard Dad's car in the driveway. Sam smiled. "It'll be better now." He sounded hopeful. Sometimes things were better when Dad was home.

By the time we got upstairs, Dad was already in the kitchen. "Doris!" he called out cheerily as he stared into the fridge. "I'm home!" He heard the stair I was standing on creak and turned to see Sam and me. "Well, there are my two monsters!" he said, shutting the fridge, and beckoning us over. I squeaked when he wrapped his arms around me to hug me.

"What's wrong, honey?" He lifted the sleeve of my shirt up to reveal the bruises that had gone a purple color. "Not again." His voice shook. I tried to step away, but he stripped the shirt over my head entirely to see all the other bruises. "No. Not again!" He kept repeating it over and over. "Doris!" he called another time, though not cheery at all anymore. I whimpered and backed up into Sam, turning into him so I could hide my face in his shoulder.

"I didn't mean to let him see," I said into Sam's shirt. Sam patted my bare shoulder softly and edged me towards the stairs, away from where Mom would soon be coming in. When she did come in, she glared at us, her red lipstick lips turned down, and her eyebrows bunched together in the center.

"What have you done to her?" Dad yelled.

"You should have seen the mess she made!" Mom said without flinching at all.

"You're going to kill them if you can't get a hold of yourself." He was really mad, but it didn't matter. He'd been really mad before when Sam got a black eye. They didn't let him go to school for a couple of weeks telling the teachers that Sam had chicken pox.

Mom and Dad circled each other, no longer seeing us, as Sam pulled me down the stairs with him. When we got to Sam's door, I looked at him. "Can I sleep in your room tonight?" The thought of having to go upstairs and around my parents to get to my room made me want to start bawling right then and there.

He nodded and we went into his room together. I pulled out the sleeping bag Sam kept under his bed while Sam shut the door to try to muffle their yelling. But we could still hear them perfectly through the heat vents. Sam handed me one of his shirts to put on and then went to shut off the light.

"Don't!" I cried out. "Leave it on, please?"

His hand moved away from the switch and he climbed into his bed, lying on his stomach and dropping his hand over the side so I could hold onto it. It was too early to be going to bed and we hadn't had any dinner, but from past experience we knew the hunger would go away when sleep came. We listened to them upstairs for a long time into the night.

I knew it was over when she started crying and telling him he just didn't understand. He agreed to get a nanny to help her out. He agreed she needed to go do more things outside the house away from the children. He agreed she should go back to school and develop herself better. He agreed . . . he agreed . . . he agreed.

We listened. A nanny sounded like a good idea. Maybe she would be our new mom and the Doris Mom would go away and not come back.
I imagined a new mom cuddling me in her arms and doing blowfishes on my cheeks for kisses.

I imagined it until long after Sam's breathing turned into snores.

I imagined it long after I grew up.

Author's note:

This book was painful to write. So many times I found myself crying over my fictional characters and wondering if I would have had the strength to do what they did. Painstaking research accompanied this book as I read story after story of women who wanted to have children but couldn't and were forced into a lengthy and expensive adoption process. There were even more stories of girls who were pregnant, girls who had abortions and later regretted that decision, girls who gave their babies up for adoption, and girls that kept their children to raise alone.

The stories were all so varied and yet all the same. The fear, the feeling of loneliness, the panic of their situations were identical, whether they were women wanting a baby or women regretting the fact they were having a baby.

I wanted to include some websites to research the situation if you fall into one of the above categories. I want you to know you are not alone. There are options for everyone in every situation.

Adoption.com

Adoption.org

Providentliving.org

Stand Up Girl