Trigger

I was born a nameless child, nameless like the snowflake drifting through the sky, nameless like the jeans at a thrift store, nameless like the bike you bought secondhand for a kid who never got anything. I’d heard her say things like, “Little shit” and “Hey, fucker”. So, as natural as anything is in this world, I would respond, becoming a label rather than a person.

I remember wearing shirts five times bigger than what my size was. She’d thrust it over my head and walk away, and I remember the times when I didn’t know which holes to put my arms through, so I didn’t at all. I remember when she would throw pieces of bread at the floor and I’d dash for them before the dogs could.

But what I remember most was the night she dragged me, kicking and screaming, up the steps of the tall, grey-stoned orphanage. I didn’t know what this place was, I didn’t know if she was leaving me here for dead or if someone would know she was dropping me off. I remember she pushed me against the wall and pointed at me.

“Take one step, you little shit, ain’t nobody gonna know you were ever born.”

I was three years old, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, barely able to understand words past their simplicity. And she was leaving me alone on the dark October night, tree limbs shaking free of lingering leaves, winds blowing in swirls that gave me the chills and chattering teeth. But, somehow, I clung to the frozen wall and watched her back away before running back to her boyfriend’s car. And she didn’t look back.

I had big rosy cheeks, a head of dark, long hair falling into my bluish grey eyes. I stood in an old flannel that would fit a fifteen year old with elastic shorts that didn’t cover past my knees. I was wearing brown sandals and my toes were curling over the edge and touching the beige concrete, frozen from the drop in the temperature from summer to autumn.

My hand automatically reached out to her, my voice cracking as I screamed, “Mama!”

And she didn’t look back.

At my scream, the light overhead flickered to life and a woman with a long dark brown braid spilling over her shoulder came rushing outside in a long, pale purple cotton robe. She looked all around before looking down on me, my face angled toward her as I had my arms wrapped around my knees, rocking back and forth to capture some sort of warmth, tears streaming and spilling and flooding down my face and into the fabric of the flannel.

“Dear is me,” she whispered as a hand flattened against her chest before she crouched down. In the softest voice that caused me to flinch and a hand that lifted to push my unruly hair from my face that caused me to throw my hands up in childish defense, she whispered, “Where’s mama?”

“Mama!” I screamed in response to hearing her name, a childlike weep screaming from my already-raw throat.

She looked all around the yard before she ran back inside, the door left open, and returned a moment later with a small brown fleece blanket. Wrapping it around my shoulders, she pulled me into her chest as she gathered me up and took me into the lukewarm orphanage.

“Lewis,” she called, her hand on the back of my head, pressing me into the crook of her neck. She approached a sliding window with an overweight African American man sitting behind it, his feet propped up as he watched a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show. “I need you to pull up the surveillance of the past ten minutes.”

Doing as he was told, Lewis rolled the tapes back and played as my mother dragged me by the long sleeve of the flannel up the stairs. She watched as my mother grabbed me by my hair and pushed me into the wall, her finger pointing at me as her mouth dripped with malice.

“Oh, this poor child,” the woman whispered against my hair, her warm, vanilla-scented breath spiraling through my nostrils. “What should we name him?”

Ignoring her question, or maybe he was thinking hard on it, Lewis tilted my chin away from her shoulder. “Look, Melanie, he’s got a little nick under his ear.”

“Nick,” Melanie whispered as if she was testing the name off the tip of her tongue, mystified, while Lewis grappled around for a napkin to wipe the drying blood from beneath my ear, putting pressure on it to stop it from bleeding further. “We’ll name him Nick.”