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By Root 287 0

I was free like the people I see here. Free to walk around and be me. But I wasn’t. The next time we went out was Halloween that same year 1999, we went to the Smith Farm and we all dressed up that year, me and Nancy were hippies, A was Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and my youngest daughter was Blue from Blue’s Clues. Phillip wore his old ’70s-style rock ’n’ roll outfit that he had kept from his days when he was in a band. He brought his guitar and serenaded anyone that would listen. It was quite embarrassing, but everyone was friendly and polite. The kids got to pick pumpkins and it was fun. One thing remained the same: I knew we had to return to the “secret backyard,” where there was no house to come home to, just a building and by that time a few tents.

One outing melted into the next. I learned to not look people in the eye. I felt if I did, they would ask me questions I couldn’t possibly answer. I stuck close to Nancy. I could feel my hands shaking when I reached out to touch something I wanted. In time going out became easier and we even brought the girls shopping with us. But I could never shake the feeling that one day someone would say, “Hey, aren’t you that missing girl?” but nobody ever did. I was nobody. Nobody saw me.

Cats

There is a stray cat in the backyard that Phillip feeds and she had a batch of kittens. He calls her “mama kitty.” She is going to live in the house with Phillip’s mother. He found homes for all the kittens except one who he is keeping tied up in the backyard. He named him Blackjack. He is very friendly. It’s nice having a kitty around again. I didn’t like how Phillip was treating him, though. When he would go on his “runs,” Blackjack could sometimes be heard crying at night. He is not fixed yet, so the crying is loud and gets on Phillip’s nerves. To shut him up, he tosses the contents of his urine bucket on poor Blackjack. I hate it and tell him to stop. When he’s high on drugs, he never listens to me. But I bring it up again when he’s coming off of the drugs and he says he feels bad about doing that to the cat and promises me he won’t use that method anymore. I tell him it would help to get him fixed, and Phillip says he will look into getting it done.

Reflection

Blackjack lived a long life. Toward the end I took primary care of him and I was the one that found him when he died. It was very hard for me. At the time, I had made a cat enclosure which he would go in at night to keep safe, and that’s where I found him one morning. It was in 2002, he was all curled up dead and stiff. I cried a lot for him. I could tell his time was coming, though, because he was not himself for many days before that.

A few years later, when the girls were little, I used to go outside to be by myself. Sometimes I would feel a pressure build inside of me. The need to run away would feel so heavy that in order to soothe myself, I would sit by myself outside. Not where anyone could see me—just to a point where I felt I was away and by myself. One of my favorite spots was a woodpile that was on the other side of one of the many fences in the backyard. One day I noticed that a stray cat was going back there a lot, so I sat for a long time and watched and, sure enough, out popped three little kittens. I put wet food out for them, trying to lure them out. Only one turned out to be friendly and I asked Phillip if I could keep him and he said yes. The others he took to the local pound for adoption. The one I kept was a male, long hair, he looked like a Maine coon. I named him Tucker. I think he was the first cat that I really felt was mine. Although I loved Eclipse, I never really felt she was mine. I found Tucker myself. I fed him. I made sure he was safe, I loved him deeply. He was always so sweet and affectionate and came whenever I called. Well … sometimes. I remember one evening at dinnertime, I called and called and he didn’t come for the longest time. I usually let them out during part of the day and then I put them back inside their enclosure at night by feeding them. Well, that day I called