Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Orphan Girl Mine

2015; Colorado State University; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/col.2015.0105

2325-730X

Robyn Carter,

Child Welfare and Adoption

Orphan Girl Mine Robyn Carter (bio) The last time I saw my father, I don’t remember his saying anything, just his silhouette at the top of the basement staircase, his cloudy essence hovering in the rectangle of kitchen light there. As Mom hustled me down the steps, I turned my head and watched him vanish. She settled me into her Pontiac’s chilly backseat, dropped a pillowcase full of clothes at my feet, and then we were gone, hurtling through the gray hours of morning toward a shiny new desert religion. We finally ground to a stop in the middle of a boundless stretch of the Mojave, where things either withered or gleamed, and through a shroud of sun-soaked dust, a man approached the car, his black eyes sucking light. My mother would marry him that afternoon in a windowless church he’d built in the sand. Over the years that followed, Joshua would teach me the secrets to raising corn in inhospitable soil, and the right way to auger a hole, clean a bolt-action rifle, and unfurl a bale of barbed wire, in the process flooding me with a rush of conditional love, a nameless heat almost too dangerous to acknowledge—even among kindred prey. Survivors, we’re called, members of a sisterhood where not killing yourself is an identity, a faith. Its scripture is a spiral-bound workbook called Survivor to Thriver: Recovery in Three Stages, its catechism a series of assessment quizzes designed to quantify the healing process. Have you made an inventory of the problem areas in your adult life? Do you often lose valuable things? Have you taken initiative in altering the way you present yourself to the world by getting a more stylish haircut or updating your wardrobe? My answers indicate I am making some kind of progress, but still, I marvel at Joshua as if he were a unique and defective piece of myself: an extra joint, a crumpled wing, a disfiguring but seductive scar, something magical that looks wrong and aches. But something. My real father is not a piece of me at all, though there was a time I thought he might be. I looked but never found him, and figured I never would, until the County of Butte, Montana, [End Page 27] tracked me down this morning and asked me what to do with his body. The woman on the phone called me his “next of kin.” For a legal term, the words sounded deceptively down-home and cozy. When I asked how she found me, she mentioned my birth certificate had been discovered among my father’s personal effects and ticked off a list of database searches—credit reports, driver’s licenses. And you’ve got an arrest record, she said, so that helped. How? Well— But I was a minor then— Nothing’s ever completely erased. Are you sure there’s no one else? We’ve been trying to contact your brother too. My what? I scribbled down a name and number on a piece of junk mail, the whir and moan of my son’s video game thin and distant, even though he was sitting on the floor at my feet, jiggling knobs, hitting buttons, killing and dying over and over, my announcements—dead grandfather, new uncle—barely registering with him over the din, but now the piercing sounds of intergalactic warfare reach my ears with deafening clarity. Can you turn that down, Fen? I say, and click open a copy of the coroner’s report the lady on the phone emailed me. I scroll though its bold-faced section headings: Evidence of Therapeutic Intervention, Lacerations and Contusions. The document is called the Investigator’s Narrative, a story with no beginning or middle, only an end, its language a stark and blunt kind of poetry. Decedent’s chest: pathologically pliable; Lips: unremarkable; Teeth: normal; Subarachnoid hemorrhage: mild and diffuse. In a section called Death Due to the Consequences Of, I read about how my father’s skull collided with a rock, and the fatal headwaters of the Clark Fork River swept his body downstream. His final moments are even more elusive to me than...