Chapter One

This book is a work of creative nonfiction. Creative license has been used throughout, names have been changed and the ending re-imagined. Although liberties have been taken with the story line, this is an adaptation of a true story and real-life events.

Georgia, 1987

Anna

Chapter 1

Anna looked out of the window of her father’s rusty burgundy Oldsmobile. She wasn’t quite sure of the time, only that it was still dark. She was barely awake, having been roused in the middle of the night by her father gently shaking her shoulder. It was hot, even at night, in late June, and she was made even more uncomfortable by the vinyl seats of the old car that stuck to her legs. There were too many strip malls in the suburbs of Atlanta and the bright lights of the parking lots were making her dizzy as they flew by her vision. She blissfully closed her eyes against the assault until she felt the car stop, then opened them to a squint to see what was happening. She was vaguely aware of her father getting out of the car. Anna looked out of the window and watched her father approach a car in the parking lot they had pulled over into. Sleepily she thought, “that kind of looks like mommy’s car,” but she was too small and too tired to make much sense of what was going on. About an hour ago, Anna’s father had come into her room in their family’s double-wide and uttered the words that her seven-year-old self would remember for the rest of her life; “Anna, wake up. Mommy’s not home yet. We’re going to go look for her.”

Still in her pink Minnie Mouse pajamas, Anna sat in the car clutching her favorite teddy bear. Her short, dark hair was cut in a bowl shape around her head, for ease her mother had said, and right now was sticking up in odd places. She wished her brother, Will, was here. Will had gone to upstate New York with their grandparents to visit their aunt, uncle and cousin. For as long as she could remember in her short life, their grandparents had always been with them no matter where they moved. And they moved a lot. Anna missed them terribly. She missed Will. She missed her mom, even though she just saw her yesterday before she left for work. Judy Martin was a waitress at Pizza Hut and, while Anna didn’t know exactly what her mom did the entire time she was away, she knew that when she arrived back home and was still in the required black pants and green polo shirt, that she smelled like pizza. Anna would sit on her mom’s lap in the old rocking chair, stick her face in her mother’s neck and inhale that smell for all she was worth. Judy would say after a few minutes of snuggling, “OK, let me up, I need to take a bath and wash this food smell off me”. Anna didn’t have her mom to sniff right now, but held on tight to the Heart-to-Heart bear that her mother had painstakingly searched for. It was the only thing she had wanted for Christmas and, even though she was only seven, her eleven-year-old brother had been a little too free with the information that Santa wasn’t real. Anna was not really upset by this revelation, she mostly thought it made complete sense, such was her logical mind at even this young age.

Her father opened the car door and sat down heavily on the driver’s side seat, making an effort to squeeze his long legs under the steering wheel and muttered, “We have to go to the police station.” William Martin Jr. was tall and had to keep his seat back as far as it would go to fit into the car, but Anna thought the car was huge. William Martin Sr. was Anna’s grandfather, who was in New York with her brother and she adored him. There were so many Williams in Anna’s family that everyone called her father “Sonny” and William III, her brother, simply went by “Will.” Anna often wondered why no one could think of a new name in their family. There were plenty of boys in her first-grade class, all with different names. What was so hard about it? Thinking about this made her miss her grandpa. He was the strongest man she knew even though he was shorter than her father and even at age eleven, her brother was taller than him too. He was shorter even than her grandmother and Anna always thought they looked kind of funny when they stood next to each other. All she knew was that William Sr. made her feel like she was his whole world whenever she was in the room. She wished they would hurry up and come back home. The fact that Will had gotten to go to New York and Anna hadn’t was a point of contention in the Martin family. Anna had wanted to go to too. In fact, she wanted to do everything Will did and also declared that she liked everything that he liked. So much so, that her family had nicknamed her “Little Me Too” because every time Will declared he wanted to do something or go somewhere, Anna would claim, “me too!” She had not been allowed to go though. Her family had claimed she was too young to be away from home for that long without her parents, or something like that. Anna had the feeling that the real reason was that her Uncle Tom and Aunt Barb had a son who was only a couple of years older than Will and they would be doing boy stuff the entire time and ignore her. That was probably true, but she wanted to go anyway. After they left and Anna had been crying for two days, her parents proclaimed they were going to drive the 400 miles from Griffin to Orlando and take Anna to Disney World. Indeed they had, and it had been fun enough, but would have more fun if Will was with them. They had stayed overnight in Orlando for two whole nights, which was actually nice since she didn’t have both of her parents in the same room with her very often. And when she did, there was usually yelling. Sometimes she knew her father hurt her mom, but she was too scared to actually look and see how badly, alternating between covering her eyes and her ears. There’s not a lot of places to hide in a trailer, but Anna and Will would crouch down behind the rocking chair that her mom would sit with her in, which somehow made the whole thing even sadder. Will would cover her ears and they would pretend to be invisible until it was over. Usually their dad would just leave, and that would be that. But in Orlando, there was no yelling and no need to hide behind anything in their hotel room. Anna thought that just maybe this trip would make everything better.

Anna must have dozed off again, because the next thing she knew, she was being gently shaken awake by her father. “Sweetheart, wake up. We have to go inside.” Anna peered up blearily at her father. He was slim as well as tall. He was tanned from doing construction in the hot Georgia sun, his dark hair was slicked back and he had long sideburns, reminding her of Elvis. She knew who Elvis was, because her dad played him a lot when they were in the car. She loved singing with her dad in the car. Her dad played music too. He played guitar and he sang in a real band. Anna had gotten to watch him a few times, most memorably the night when he pulled her out of the crowd and picked her up and put her on top of the piano, where he sang a song right to her! There were times when she was so proud that he was her daddy and there were other times when she wished she had one of those fathers that taught her how to ride a bike, or heck, fed her dinner when her mom was at work. The conflicting feelings came and went by the day, maybe even by the hour. Right now, he was looking at her with a serious face and a duplication of her own brown eyes. “I’m awake,” Anna mumbled and reached for the door handle of the Oldsmobile. Before she was all the way out, he was by her side and taking her hand.

At first, Anna was thinking that this was the first time that she had ever been inside a police station. Then she thought harder and decided that maybe that wasn’t true. She remembered one time she had come to one of these places with her mom to see her dad. He hadn’t been home for a long time and Anna was excited to see him. But when they saw him, he was behind a glass window. She couldn’t hug him and she had to talk to him on a telephone, which she thought was strange since he was so close. “He’s right there, why can’t he hear me?” He had asked Anna and Will how they were doing and asked Anna what she wanted for her birthday. She told him she wanted a new bike. He smiled and said, “I’ll see what I can do.” Soon, he was home again and, amazingly, Anna got the new bike she wanted. It was pink and had streamers and a basket and she drove that thing all through the trailer park blasting Madonna from her pink cassette player that hung from the handlebars. She secretly knew that her mother had gotten her the bike, but had thanked both of her parents nonetheless. Now, she blinked her eyes against the fluorescent lights of the police station to help them adjust from the dark outside. There were a few people inside. A dark-haired male officer sat behind a desk with glass that kind of looked like the one she talked to her father through that day, except there was a little hole in the center of it. There was another older man sitting on a hard, plastic chair in the waiting area whose clothes looked like they needed to be washed, and so did his face for that matter. Finally, there was a woman, maybe a little younger than her mother, who was sitting on another plastic chair in the corner crying quietly. She had a mark on her face that was mostly red, but starting to turn a little purple. Anna had seen marks like that before and wished she could make the lady feel better, but her father was holding too tight to her hand. When they reached the desk, her father spoke in very low tones to the officer behind the desk. Anna couldn’t hear much as she was two and a half feet below where her father’s voice was coming from and he was practically whispering. She heard snippets, “wife….work….didn’t come home….”  After a few minutes, father and daughter joined the man and the crying woman on the hard chairs in the waiting area.