Inside Out(15)

Tom was right, of course. Only hours after we’d arrived in Albuquerque, my mother started a screaming fight with my aunt—I can’t remember what set her off, but I can tell you for sure it was unimportant, some perceived slight that could have been easily resolved with a calm conversation. “We’re out of here!” she shrieked, and told me we were going to my grandmother’s in Roswell. I was disgusted with her and angry at myself. The trip had been a mistake. I just wanted to get back to L.A. and my calm life with Tom.

Ginny wouldn’t give me my plane ticket. She was furious that I wouldn’t do what she wanted—she accused me of being a terrible daughter, of thinking I was too good for her, of taking her for granted. She slammed the door behind her and plowed out of my aunt’s driveway in a rage. So there I was, stranded in New Mexico, without the money to get back home. I had to ask my aunt if I could borrow the seventy-five dollars for a new plane ticket. The guilt I felt—for years—for owing her that money would be difficult to overstate. It seemed like something my parents would do: show up at someone’s house and then, instead of thanking them for their hospitality, ask them for money. It was the opposite of who I wanted to be.

The next day at the airport waiting to fly home, I thought about what a complete mess my parents were and felt very deeply alone. Your mother and father are supposed to act as a kind of touchstone along the path to the future—offering insight on what to reach for, what to look forward to. For me, that picture was dismal.

I went out onto the tarmac to board, and as I was walking toward the plane with the other passengers, I heard my name. I turned and saw a police officer in uniform approaching me. “Are you Demi Guynes?” he asked. I nodded, confused, and he said, “You need to come with me.” He took me by the arm and led me away while the other passengers gawked like I was a criminal. “Your parents are here,” he told me, as he walked me into a little room where, sure enough, Ginny and Danny were waiting for me.

I stammered, “What the hell is going on?”

My mother gave a triumphant little smile. “You’re under eighteen,” she replied with satisfaction. “We reported you to the police as a runaway.” I could tell from her speech that she’d been drinking. My father was so wasted his eyes were completely glassy. I turned to the cop who had brought me in. “Can’t you see they’re drunk?” I asked, furious, adrenaline pumping through my body. I don’t know that I’ve ever been angrier: the complete injustice of the situation was just too much. And the dishonesty! Like they cared about my well-being? As if they were these concerned, normal parents? “You’re making a huge mistake! You don’t know what you’re doing,” I told the policeman. “I haven’t lived with either of them in over six months!” I could tell he was starting to recognize that something was wrong with this picture. Ginny and Danny had probably been sitting there getting more and more inebriated while he’d been out looking for me. Of the three of us, I was clearly the closest thing to an adult. “I’m so sorry,” the cop said quietly. But I was under eighteen, and he didn’t have much choice.

So I was stuck with them. These two lying, alcoholic, divorced people—who last I’d heard weren’t speaking—were my parents; they had ensnared me, and they demanded I return to Roswell with them. The hours while we waited for that plane—and they continued drinking at the airport bar—felt endless.

After we landed, we got in the car they’d left at the airport in Roswell, but my dad was so wasted he got pulled over by the police on the drive back. Unbelievably, he managed to sweet-talk his way out of a ticket. (My brother always says my dad could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, and that incident was proof.) It was the middle of the night when we reached the house my dad was sharing with my uncle Buddy, who, it became clear, was every bit as drunk as my father—Buddy was just getting home after the bars closed. Morgan wasn’t there, and I couldn’t even look at my mother, who was barely paying attention to me at this point anyway: she had only been interested in winning a power struggle, and once she was victorious, she went back to focusing on herself. Before long, Buddy and my dad were fighting, lurching drunkenly through the house, everything becoming violent and out of control. When I saw my dad pull out his gun and start waving it at Buddy, I thought, That’s enough. It was very late, and the sky was black and moonless, but the world outside that house was less frightening than the one inside it. I walked out the door and kept going for four miles along the unlit roads until I reached my grandma Marie’s house.

It was one thirty in the morning. I was so sorry for my grandmother: that I was waking her up in the middle of the night; that my parents had obviously weaseled money out of her for their plane tickets to go and “save” me at the airport in Albuquerque; that she had to put up with these people and their insanity altogether. I was apologizing and telling her what had happened, and she wanted me to call Ginny and tell her where I was so my parents wouldn’t worry. “They don’t care about me,” I said, and at that moment, I knew I was telling the truth.

Forty years later, I no longer think of it in those terms. They loved me. But they loved me the way they loved each other, the only way they knew how: inconsistently and conditionally. From them, I learned that love was something you had to scramble to keep. It could be revoked at any minute, for reasons that you couldn’t understand, that you couldn’t control. The kind of love I grew up with was scary to need, and painful to feel. If I didn’t have that uneasy ache, that prickly anxiety around someone, how would I know it was love?