My long-term plan had already been formulated, starting with the solemn promise I made to myself that when I grew up and had a son of my own, he would always know who I was and I would never disappear from his life. But the short-term plan was much harder to figure out. How could I fend off the powerlessness not only of having no daddy and of being labeled “you big-eared motherfucker” but, much more damaging to my psyche, the powerlessness that came from the fear that never seemed to let up at home.

It was fear of what Freddie might do and what he’d already done. Big-time fear. Fear that I’d come home to find my mother murdered. Fear that my sisters and I would be murdered. Fear that the next time Freddie came home drunk, pulled out his shotgun, and woke all of us at the end of the barrel, shouting, “Everybody get the fuck outta my goddamned house!” he’d make good on his promise to kill us all. It had gotten to the point by this time that Moms slept on the living room couch with her shoes on—in case she had to run, carrying the baby and dragging the rest of us out of the house fast. Fear that the next time Freddie beat Momma up within an inch of her life he would go that inch too far. Fear that I’d have to watch that beating or watch Freddie beat Ophelia or take the beating myself and not be able to do anything to stop it. What could I do that the police couldn’t or wouldn’t, as many times as they’d show up and either do nothing or take Freddie away and send him home after he sobered up?

The questions of what was I going to do and how was I going to do it loomed large. They followed me at school, snuck into my waking and sleeping thoughts, and stirred up the nightmares that had troubled me most of my young life, nightmares that went back to foster care when there was a supposed witch down the street. Some of the dreams I was having were so terrifying, I was too paralyzed to wake, believing in my sleep that if I could knock something over, a bedside lamp, for example, it would rouse someone in the house to come to my rescue and help me escape whatever terror was in that dream at the time.

“Chris!” Sharon’s voice pierces my semiconscious state once more.

Now I open my eyes, sitting bolt upright, taking a fast inventory. Before I went to sleep, nothing eventful had happened, other than some Halloween trick-or-treating, after which Ophelia went to a party with her friends—where she is, apparently, at the present. Otherwise, it had been a fairly quiet night in the back house that we rent from my entrepreneurial aunt, Miss Bessie, the first in our extended family to own a home—which houses her beauty salon business, Bessie’s Hair Factory, in the basement.

Crying, Sharon pulls at my sleeve, telling me, “Momma’s on the floor.”