Copyright 2014 Wanda Lotus
Claire was always the invisible one in the family. Nobody noticed her until the day she didn’t show up for supper.
Well, that isn’t exactly true. Of course they noticed her at other times. Mama counted on her presence providing an easy target for her frustration with the direction life had taken her. Her sister Amanda counted on her as someone to blame for whatever happened to be bugging her that day. The only ones she was truly invisible to were Papa and her brother John.
Papa was the first to mention her absence at the dinner table. “Where’s Claire?” he asked as he cut into his pork chop.
“Probably in her room sulking like always. You know that girl has a bad attitude.” Mama leaned back from the table and hollered down the hallway of the apartment, “Claire, get in here to the dinner table right now!” She turned to young John, her obvious favorite, and patted him on the head as he shoveled down his food. She noted with approval that John had his favorite cup…which also happened to be Claire’s. Her being late for dinner meant her baby could have the cup without any fuss, for a change.
Mama turned to her other daughter, bracing herself for insolence, prepared to deliver another slap like the one she’d delivered the night before when the girl had dared to want to be left alone for a while to talk to some boy on the phone. “Amanda, have you seen your sister?”
“She was in our room when I got home from school.”
“I’ll go check on her. She probably has her nose stuck in a book.” Papa pushed back from the table with a sigh and disappeared down the hall. A few moments later he reappeared. “She isn’t there.”
“What do you mean she isn’t there?”
“Claire isn’t in the girls’ room. She isn’t in our room, John’s room, or either bathroom.”
Mama shoved her chair back and huffed over to the frosted balcony doors. She flung them open, prepared to lecture Claire, but realized the balcony was unoccupied. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she muttered under her breath. She shut the balcony doors and went to the girls’ room herself.
The girls’ room was way too small for two teenage girls. They had re-stacked their previously separated bunk beds against one wall in order to give themselves more floor space. A double dresser took up the opposite wall. The single closet in the corner was, she knew, overflowing with clothes. Mama rested her hand on the handle to the closet door, and remembering Claire’s affinity for hiding in the closet as a young girl, flung the door open.
Claire wasn’t in there, either.
“Amanda, are you sure Claire was here when you got in from school?” Mama demanded.
“Yes, she was sitting on her bunk writing in her diary. I came out here to do homework. I haven’t seen her since.”
Mama stared at her, one palm already tingling in anticipation. “Are you sure you aren’t lying to cover for her?”
“I’m telling the truth!”
“Okay.” Now Mama was annoyed. It wasn’t like Claire to just disappear. She checked every bedroom and every closet herself, just to be sure. She even looked under all of the beds. But Papa was right: Claire was not anywhere in the apartment.
Mama’s annoyance turned to rage. The girls knew not to leave the house without permission, and she never would have given them permission to leave the house, once they had come in from school. Claire didn’t have a cell phone; neither girl did, nor did they have internet access, so she couldn’t call or text Claire to find out where she was.
Returning to the bedroom, Mama began to go through Claire’s things. She rummaged through the closet, dumped out every dresser drawer, and even turned over Claire’s mattress. Of course the diary was nowhere to be found; Mama had figured out long ago that wherever Claire went, that diary went. She realized Claire’s schoolbag was missing, along with her sneakers and a few changes of clothing. Suddenly her blood ran cold as she realized Claire had had the nerve, the audacity not just to leave the house without asking, but to leave without intending to come back that night.
“Did that ungrateful wretch actually run away?” Mama screamed, flinging a dresser drawer across the room. “No, I refuse to believe that. She wouldn’t dare, after all I do to make a good home for her.” She stomped into the master bedroom and grabbed her telephone book. Of course she had the names and numbers to Claire’s few friends. Claire was probably over at one of their homes. She’d call all over town, if she had to, but she’d find her daughter and bring her back home. “I’ll give her something to want to run away for, when I find her,” she muttered.
At 17, Claire was admittedly a moody young woman. Her diary was full of lamentations about her lot in life being born into a family with a mother who resented her being female, a younger sister who resented her being the eldest girl, and a father and brother who hardly noticed her existence. Living amongst those kinds of people day in and day out would make anyone moody. But she wasn’t a liar, and she wasn’t ungrateful. She was simply misunderstood, she knew that. She also knew she was very smart, as her straight A’s last year in 11th grade had testified to her jealous classmates.
A year ago, Claire had decided to put her smarts to use.
For a year, every penny she earned from gift money went into her savings account. A month earlier she had begun withdrawing a few hundred dollars a week in cash, until every penny of the $1000 in her account had been withdrawn. She knew that as a minor, her parents could freeze her assets, if she’d left anything in the account. She couldn’t close the account, so she simply left it empty. She knew her mother would find her bank book and realize what was going on, soon after she was gone.
During the year she was saving her money, Claire did a lot of reading. The library was one of the few places she was allowed to go unattended and without question. She spent a lot of time there looking up youth organizations. There she had found the hotline number for a crisis center. She’d spent a lot of time talking to the friendly counselors via their toll free number. Thank goodness for the bank of pay phones outside the library. They had helped her understand that what she was going through at home was not normal, was most definitely abusive. She hadn’t thought it was; didn’t all kids get “spanked” with a belt until they were 16 years old? Apparently not, from the shocked response she got from the counselor when she told her. That led her on a research frenzy about abuse: what it was, what it was not, how to escape it, how to recover from it. She was stunned to find that even though she did not go to school with cuts and burns and bruises, those books could have been written about her family. She saw herself in the survival stories.
She decided to be a survivor.
At some point she found a network of people who acted like an underground railroad of sorts. They helped young people escape abusive homes and get safely established elsewhere. Claire timed her escape for the month before her 18th birthday. After that birthday she would no longer have to hide from her parents, because they wouldn’t have any legal standing to force her to return. She could get a job, finish high school, and even go to college, all without needing a parent’s signature. So she saved and planned, and when the time came, she ran.
It was a stroke of luck that allowed her to leave the house unnoticed. Amanda was busy with homework in the living room and was blasting gospel music on the stereo. Mama had taken John to the playground behind their apartment complex. Papa hadn’t yet come home from work. All Claire had to do was walk out, being careful to quietly shut and lock the door behind her. Amanda never heard her leave.
As quickly as possible, Claire took a side stairwell out of the apartment building and ran the three blocks to the designated pickup spot. By the time her family realized she was gone, she was 3 hours away, across the NJ border into Delaware. It would be a day or two before NJ authorities would spread their search outside of the state, and by then she’d have been given a new identity. The kind ladies who had dropped her off at the safe house refused all of her offers to give them a little money for their trouble. “You’re a good girl,” she remembered the elder of the two gently saying. “We’re happy to help you. Stay safe, and when you are old enough and in a position to help another young person like yourself, make sure you do.” She walked between them to the door, turned and waved to them once they’d seen her safely inside, and watched them disappear as quickly as they’d appeared to pick her up from her old neighborhood.
20 years later, Claire got a call at 2a.m. A 17-year-old girl two hours away needed a ride to a safe house. Could she drive? She was wide awake in an instant, pulling on her clothes almost before she hung up the phone. Her husband stirred when he heard the jingle of her car keys. “Sweetheart, where are you going at this hour?”
She walked over to the bed, pulled the blankets back over him and kissed him warmly on the cheek. “Someone’s in trouble. You know my story. Now it’s my turn to give back. Don’t wait up.”
“Okay. I’m proud of you, Babe. Be careful.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. I will. Love you.” Then she was gone.