Days 24 and 25 – Writing exercise

Dreams, they can take you places, or they can scare you to death

…

It was difficult at the best of times getting to sleep, a problem that went back to my childhood when, one night as I was going to sleep, the police arrived, kicked the front and back doors in and dragged my mother and father away into the night.

I was taken away by a sullen, obese woman who stank of cigarette smoke, whom I was told was from Child Services.  She promptly dumped me in an orphanage three towns away, told nothing of where and what happened to my parents, and no one seemed to care or come and find me.

That was when I realised, at 10 years old, that life could irrevocably change for the worse in the blink of an eye, that whatever life you thought you had could be taken away just as easily.

That first week in hell taught me everything I needed to know about survival, that there was no such thing as friends, allies, only enemies.

The first month, if you survived, turned you into a person who was unrecognisable from who you were. At the end of it, I looked in the mirror and could not recognise the boy who had arrived there what seemed like an eternity ago.

At the end of that first year, when my Aunt whom I’d never seen or heard of before, came to see if she really had a nephew, and somehow under the scraggy exterior seemed to find a family resemblance.

I was not sure whether I was supposed to be relieved.  By that time, I could not trust anyone or anything, or whether this was trading one form of hell with another.

In the car heading to wherever my new home would be, I had told myself I would stay until I could escape, that this was just another trick, one of many they played on us orphans.

But I had to ask, “How did you find out who I am and where I was?”

If it was a trick, she was far more kind-looking than the others.

“A coincidence.  I have a friend who works in the police department.  She was sorting through a pile of old Wanted notices and found one she thought was my sister, because of the resemblance. Turns out it was.  I hired a private detective to find them, and here you are.”

“It took you a year?”

“I didn’t know my sister all that well, and she broke off contact the day she left, 15 years old and pregnant.  Our parents threw her out.  I’m not surprised she had a Wanted notice on her and that useless boy she was involved with.  Nothing good was ever going to come of it.”

Whatever she thought, that was not the mother I remembered.  What had been the worst part of the last year was the difference in how I’d been treated.  My mother was kind, gentle and loving.  I had never wanted for or needed anything.

My father was a different story, and now I could see that he was bad, and led them down a path of self-destruction, leading to the last straw, a failed attempt at robbing a gas station, and accidentally shooting the attendant. 

I guess if there was a moment in time when the nightmares started, that was it.  The look of pure fury on my father’s face, the look of total despair on my mother’s, and then the feeling of dread I had, because instinctively I knew what was going to happen.

“For what it’s worth,” I said, “thanks for getting me out of that place.  I promise you won’t know I exist.”

I saw her give me a measured look, one that told me that she was not sure if she could believe anything I said, because trust needed to be earned, and for me, it was going to be very difficult.

“I’m sorry it took so long.  I can’t promise that life will be easier because I’m sure, like you, it’s hard to accept new people you’ve never met before, but it will be better than what you had.”

…

Better was just a word, one that could describe a lot of things.  My life, in one sense, was better, but in others, much worse.

I was brought into an existing family where the family dynamic was set, three girls and two boys. They were older and resentful that another kid was vying for attention, another mouth to feed, and a bed to find, and having nothing when I arrived, they were every bit as possessive as the tribe I left behind.

Good intentions counted for nothing.

Children, no matter what the situation, are cruel, at home, at school, anywhere.  The thing is, they didn’t realise I had a year’s experience of their kind of behaviour, only a hundred times worse, so I simply ignored them.

They put me in the attic. I asked for nothing, I wanted nothing that I couldn’t get myself, and said nothing, about me or my parents or anything else.

Seven years, until I graduated top of the class, far better than any of my step-siblings, who honestly believed they didn’t have to work for anything, that their parents were there to hand-feed them.

The day after I finished school and presented my so-called mother with a bank draft for an amount I calculated to be worth the seven years of care, quite a considerable sum when taken in context, I left.

No one, in the end, seemed to care.

…

I went to the nearest big city, having accepted a position at a newspaper, one of the few still published daily, and was starting at the bottom. 

My intention: to spend my spare time finding out what happened to my parents.  I figured I was not going to get a position working for a private detective agency, though I did try, so the media was next in line.

I’d worked on the student newspaper and had been trained up to a point by the English teacher who had studied journalism some time, as he called it, in a murky past.

In my spare time, I had been given access to the archives, including the back copies of the newspaper.  It was in the process of being digitised, but as yet not to the extent that it was usable.

My job for the ensuing month or two was getting bundles of dusty newspapers and scouring the issues for news.  Given that the institution had given me a copy of my records whilst incarcerated, I knew roughly when I was in the orphanage.

But, just the same, dates, places and names were hazy, and the records were incomplete, to protect those who should not have been protected.

It took time, but I found two items, and only two items.  The first was the initial report.

Heinous crime arrives at Bridgeport.

“Bridgeport man and woman arrested in relation to the attempted and subsequent murder of the service attendant at the Bridgeport gas station. The defendants had to be constrained after an altercation with several deputies, one of whom sustained superficial injuries.

“Hector Loomis has been charged with murder, a hundred count of theft and six counts of assault occasioning grievous bodily harm.  Stella Loomis is charged with being an accessory.  Their son has been removed to a state facility, pending the results of their arraignment.”

There was a photo of the two, post-arrest, and both looked like they had barely survived a car crash, though the deputies escorting them did their best to hide as much of the damage as possible

When questioned, all the sheriff would say was that they had resisted arrest and were facing extra charges of assaulting police officers in the execution of their duty.

The second was a short paragraph lost among the agricultural pages, stating they had been transferred to a state facility. 

That was it.  The weeks after that, nothing.

For all intents and purposes, they had disappeared off the face of the earth.

…

It was the photo that caught my attention.  Grainy, indistinct, but it sparked something in my memory.  I asked the archivist if there were any original photos from the journalist’s article notes, and she said to come back the next day.

I had taken note of the journalist’s name and asked whether he was still around, only to learn that I would have to go to HR for that information, but it was most likely they would not give it out.

The internet is a remarkable source of information, and I had learned over time that it was not that information couldn’t be found, it was just that you had to know how to ask the right questions.

In three hours, I had built a resume for the journalist and knew exactly where he was.  Retired, upstate, has recently had his photo and name in a rural newspaper after winning a fishing competition

He had tried very hard to hide in plain sight, and it would have worked, but for the love of fishing.

I had tracked down the sheriff of the deputies that had arrested my parents, but he was a little further away, in Florida, and not doing so well.  Depending on the journalist’s answers, it might be worth paying him a visit.

That night, when I finally retired, my head hit the pillow and filled with a hope I would get some answers, I slipped into an uneasy sleep.

…

At what point do you wake and realise it’s not where you thought you were?  I had, for quite some time, tried not to sleep because the other kids would be waiting.

It was like I was back there.

Only it was my mind playing old images over and over, perhaps lamenting that I had finally managed to put those memories away.

Until I saw that photograph of my parents.

The thing is, it was not the photo of my parents as much as it was what my mother was wearing, an old sweatshirt that was from a university she didn’t go to, one she said she found in a market stall.

One she wore to bed.

No surprise then she would be in it since she and my father had been dragged from their beds.  But the significance of it was more than just a substitute for pyjamas.  And that was the point, there was something she told me about it, thinking I was listening, and I don’t think I was.

She used to impart life lessons as she called them every morning, noon, and night, so many that it was no wonder if she switched off.

I could see her, plain as day, wandering around in that top, going about her day, which included me.  It was pure bonding time, she had once said, but those memories only went back a few years.

But that connection was what I had missed, what had been taken away from me, and never to return, even when I was with my new family.

I was still no further with the story when I finally woke, but I had gleaned some memories of my father.  He was nice when he was clean, but when drunk or drugged, he became vicious.  He had been, and still was, a drug user and abuser, and as I got older, I never understood why she didn’t just dump him and get a better man.

I guess there was a lot I had to learn about grown-up stuff.

An email told me that the archivist had found nothing.  I thanked her for her effort, but something else that I realised after I left her, her hesitation before answering questions told me that there was something about this story that put it in a different category, that asking more about it was cause me grief.

That meant, to a reporter like me, that there’s a story lurking in the details, the sort of story people tell you is best left alone because rattling the bones of the fallen dead wasn’t going to earn me any favours.

I called in sick and headed upstate.

If the reporter went all cagey on me, well, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.

…

I think I realised the moment I parked the car on the side of the dirt road beside a fence post holding up a prison class security gate that this was a man who worried about his personal safety.

At first, I thought it was to keep bears out. We were in the middle of a forest, but the very large SUV that was coming up the drive, a dusty, rutted lane way that led into the forest, told me the gate wasn’t the only security this place had.

I watched it emerge from the forest, carefully picking its way along the track and then stopping at the gate.  When the powerful engine was switched off, the sounds of the countryside returned.

The door opened, and a person got out, pulling on a Cowboys hat, then came around.  A woman, old as my grandmother, with a rifle, ready to use it.  She did not look like the sort of woman anyone would want to tangle with.

She stopped opposite me, loaded a round into the chamber and made good effect in the theatre of locking and loading.

“This is private property.  Who are you and what do you want?”

“Sam Clark.  I rang yesterday about having a chat with Ben Grother.”

“You work at the Sentinel?”

“Gopher, now.  Working on being a journalist.”

“I’m sure you’re not here to get tips.  What is your business?”

I could see the old lady was getting tired of dancing.  “Information about Hector and Stella Loomis.”

“Why?”

“I’m their son, and I would like to find out if they are dead or alive.”

She looked me up and down in the same manner the principal of the high school had when my new mother took me.  He knew I was not her son, and whatever she had told him showed in his expression, one that said I didn’t belong.

I proved him wrong, but that initial impression never changed.  People judged, rightly or wrongly.

Her expression, though, was not one of distaste or fear; it was one of sadness.

She unlocked the gate.  “I’ll take you down.”

Gate relocked, we got in the truck, did a sweeping turn and headed into the forest.  It was dark and in the distance, and in a circle of light and beyond the blue of the water.

“Bears bad out here?”

She gave me a sidelong glance.  “The bears are our friends.”

Make of that what you will, I thought.

A few minutes later, we stopped beside the house and got out.  She pointed to a pier at the bottom of a gentle slope, and a man sitting with a fishing rod.

“Ben’s getting dinner.  One day he will.” 

Perhaps she had a sense of humour; perhaps she didn’t.

“He’s expecting you.  Take care going down the hill.”

It was a warm, still day with very little movement on the water.  The pier was in the middle of a little cove, with a boat tied up a short distance from the pier.  It would be too far to swim to the other side.

To me, it would be the ideal place to spend your summer vacation.  Swimming, fishing, hiking.  Learning survival skills…

He looked up as I approached.  An old man, now I could see his days were numbered, the laboured breathing, then the weathered complexion, and the pain in his eyes.  He had come home to die on his terms.

“You’re the Loomis boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.  I’m not here to cause trouble.  You are probably the last person who took any interest in my parents.”

He motioned to the seat beside him, and I sat.  I made sure that his glass had water and that he was comfortable first, adjusting the blanket.

“I may have been the last person to see them.”

“Do you know what happened to them?”

“Not what we were told, that’s for sure.  It was a routine assignment: go down to the county courthouse and cover the proceedings.  Rookie job, but the editor said he had an off call about something big.  There was nothing of note on the docket.  But midway there was a heck of a commotion, a woman screaming, where was her kid, what had they done with him, on and on.  It sounded like a riot had broken out “

He stopped, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.  I thought after six or seven sentences, he had worn himself out or worse, lost his train of thought.

Then his eyes opened again and sparkled.  “Half an hour passes, then two people were virtually dragged on, a man and a woman.  Both looked like they’d been in a car crash, and the judge that day was
astonished.  He knew the deputies were hands-on, but this was too much to pass off as resisting arrest.  He roasted the sheriff, whose excuse was that they had shot and killed the gas attendant in a botched robbery.  Nothing he could do but sent them to jail without bail. They did it, of course, the gas station had CCTV, which was unusual in a small place.  I got a note a week later, they been sent to a State penitentiary awaiting trial, no names, no dates, nothing.”

“Is that usual in cases like this?”

“Murder, clear evidence, sometimes.  But this was different.  I recognised the girl, Stella.  Not her name at all.  She was a Banderville, from what used to be one of the richest families in Pennsylvania.  It was the seat shirt.  Penn State.  She had a brain, just didn’t use it.  Your mother was sixteen, pregnant and excommunicated.  Ran off with the gardener.  She wasn’t a killer, just ran with the wrong crowd.  Sister wasn’t much better.  But the brother, the lord and master in eating, there was a piece of work.  They reckoned he was the one who raped his younger sister, but being the only boy, he could do no wrong.  Until he did.”

“My mother was rich.”

“She didn’t want to be.  Both the sisters rebelled and were, according to their father, disappointed.  Stella had been his favourite, and it literally killed him when she left.  The son took three years to destroy what had taken over a hundred years to build.”

He shook his head.  “Three years.  Mary found you, didn’t she?  I should have guessed.  She had disappeared after the reckoning, and I lost touch with her.  She came to me, but I couldn’t help her.  I’d just had the first of three heart attacks.  I’m sorry.  I would have found you.”

“She hired a private detective.”

“Of course.”

I had a thousand questions, but it was not the time.  It seemed to me that it was a story he had rehearsed in case one day I would come.

I waited about ten minutes and then decided that he had finished, or had tired.

As I stood, he woke and looked at me.  “There’s a will, the old man had reputedly changed it the day before he died, but no one could find it.  The estate was never meant to go to the boy.  It’s out there somewhere, but here’s the thing.  As the prisoners were being taken from the courthouse to the van, the boy tripped over, and the guards swarmed on him.  That’s when the girl came over and said, “Find my son and tell him it’s in Penn”.  Odd thing, she was not wearing her sweatshirt.  Later, I asked what had happened to it, but no one could find it.  I thought there must be something in it, but like everything to do with them, it’s gone and now just another mystery.”

The old lady came down, and we sat with him for an hour or so before we went back to the cabin.

By that time, he had forgotten who I was.

…

The dreams, when they came, were of my mother.  I used to think she was a fairy who never grew old, and realised now that she was so young when she had me, a child almost herself.

But she was a great mother, something she used to tell me was given to her by her aunt, the woman she had spent most of her early years with.

I never remembered once her saying she was from a wealthy family, and neither ever spoke of it, though if I were to think about it, he was always going on about her life and how she could never understand him.

He was greedy and selfish.  And he didn’t like me.  I took her away from him.

But then there was the dream where I was playing while she was mending clothes, or in one case, she was sewing a big letter P on a shirt.

The P, she said, was a school she once went to, when younger, when she was clever, before the drinks and drugs.  It was not something she meant to do, but it happened, and she did something bad and got punished.  It was a slippery slope, one thing after another, but there was a silver lining.  I came into her life.

It was weeks before I could piece together the fragments of my memory started to format into a cohesive idea.

That the P on her sweatshirt was significant, so significant that she was rarely parted from it day or night, and that the sweatshirt was now missing.

It took a month more to discover the sweatshirt was in the inventory the night they were arrested, but not when they were transferred.  Had it been stolen?  Had it been thrown out?

Then I remembered what Ben had said, among many words, a lot of which I had forgotten because of the memories of her that had been stirred up.  It came in another dream, and this time we were in a very strange place, which she called a university.

It was a place she had attended when she was younger, and liked to visit every now and then.  But as the dreams became clearer, they focused on one person, a man, a man whose name she never mentioned except for a nickname, Ducky.

She used it in the same manner that she used mine, in a different tone and manner, and given the limited experience I had with girls, even I could see she had great affection for him.

But one noticeable thing, she tried hard not to let me, or anyone else, see them together.

What else did I suddenly realise?

Loomis wasn’t my father.  The professor was.  And the lengths she had gone to not involve him because of what would have happened to him.  The law would not have seen it as a loving relationship, but as one of an older professor taking advantage of a young girl.  Perhaps it was.

But the thought of Loomis not being my father was a relief.

My next mission was to find the professor, a man by the name of Duckworth.

Over the next week, I retraced my mother’s steps as well as I could remember them from my dreams.  It eventually took me to the Mathematics department, and there he was, an old man now, though not as old as Ben.

I sat at the top of the room and watched him try to impress the importance of his subject on the minds of the next generation of mathematicians, and to my mind, failing somewhat.  Fidgety kids talking, looking at cell phones, reading books, it was as if he was preaching to the disbelievers.

After he dismissed them, seemingly uncaring about their singular lack of interest, I watched him pack up his books.  Then, as he turned to go, he turned around and looked straight at me.

“I don’t know you, son.”

“Do you know all the kids in your class?”

“Yes.  You are…”

“Loomis.”

“Come down here, please.  My eyesight is not as good as it used to be.”

I did as he asked, then stood before him.

It took a minute, two before the expression on his face changed.  “Oh, my lord, she was telling the truth.”

“Then I’m not a Loomis?”

“No.  Oh, my Lord.  What do you remember?”

“Being in this place.  With my mother and you.  I realise now she loved you very much.”

“And I her, though it could not be.  And I was a cad back then when she told me, and that was the last I saw her.  I did see she was arrested, but it had nothing to do with that gas station robbery.  It was about who she was and what she was entitled to.  She was murdered for money.”

It was a complicated story: a man who knew the truth, but telling it would get him a long jail sentence.  Not that the truth mattered.  Had he tried to discredit the son and heir, the lawyers would have ruined him anyway. 

He had the sweatshirt, the one with the P, the one she never let out of her sight, the one she managed to get to Duckworth from the prison, the one that had the last will and testament of their father, leaving everything to the girls because he knew that the boy was a wastrel.

Only the pregnancy and his anger came with the threat to disown all of them, but he died before changing the will back. Since she had only one copy, and believing it was invalid, she never acted on it.  By the time it would have mattered, it didn’t matter; the wastrel had destroyed everything.

…

Things happen for a reason.

I don’t think I was supposed to end up in an orphanage, but the fact that I had might have saved my life.

I do think I was meant to end up with my aunt, but it was meant to be sooner, and I think my aunt was supposed to see her before she ended up in jail.

I was always meant to visit Ben.  At his funeral, six months after I visited him, his wife said he had told her a week before that he was expecting an important visitor.

Duckworth had always known that the little boy who came visiting him with his mother was special in a way he could never explain.

But one thing he was sure of, I had inherited my mother’s mathematical brain.  His too, if truth be told.  After meeting him, I had two jobs: reporter by day and mathematician the rest of the time.

When I showed my aunt the will, she was surprised, then shocked, then accepted her fate with a shrug.  It had been hard going from privilege to poverty, but age had survived.

My departure had hastened her desire to end what was, for her, a marriage of convenience and had forged a new path, away from the children who were all suffering from their newfound independence.

She was far happier these days.

As for me, nearly 20 years had passed, and half had been almost lost in time and the rest, proof that living nightmares are real.

I’m writing the story of a family that had lost everything because one person made a mistake.  It didn’t have to be like that, but in accordance with the rules and the law, it did.

But to tell it, I was going to have to change the names. 

…

©  Charles Heath  2026