The night before the concert Steve had done something wrong. I don’t recall exactly what, but I do know that John and Darlene were justified in grounding him for such a stupid act, whatever it was.
So there I was holding a pair of tickets to one of the best and biggest shows in Richmond, Virginia, and now I was going alone. We had both looked forward to that day for weeks, and now I was mad as hell at him. I couldn’t believe he would be so selfish as to risk being punished on the eve of the big event.
I didn’t want to go without him. I could have easily called one of the friends I had that were much closer to me in age—Ron, Chris, or Geoff. Chris and Geoff were brothers and had been friends with Ron for a number of years before I knew any of them. They usually hung out together and spent time watching movies.
Ron was the one that I grew close to quickly. He hardly ever asked me about my family back home. He knew I was living with John and Darlene and the kids as another son.
I really enjoyed the Datsun 280Z sports car he and his father had. Bright yellow and with more power and thrust than any car should be allowed to have, that car gave Ron and me more fun than we would have thought possible. Ron just wanted a friendship and so did I—just a friend my own age, someone who didn’t know about me and what I had been through. It wasn’t hard dodging his occasional questions about my background.
It didn’t take me long to realize that Ron, Chris, and Geoff had had little or no exposure to, or experience with, drugs and alcohol. The slightest reference to getting “high” or “drunk” was taken as a stretch of the imagination, not an actual desire.
Often Ron would call on a Friday night asking what I was doing or what I wanted to do. My replies, always similar, became a standing joke. Most of the time I simply said: “We can get stoned,” or “We could find a bar somewhere.”
Ron usually laughed it off and made some more realistic suggestion as to how to spend our evenings. He had no idea of what I had made of myself over the last eight years, and that’s exactly what I wanted. No one to know.
Ron or Chris would have loved to go to the Depeche Mode concert with me, but it wouldn’t have been the same without Steve. So I did the only thing I could. I gave the tickets to one of Steve’s friends who, like most people in town, hadn’t been able to get any. I told him that Steve wanted him to have them: “Steve isn’t able to go and he thought of you. So here you go. Enjoy!”
Inside it killed me, but then again, I felt pretty good that I had a true friend and a brother all in one. I ended up staying at home and hanging around the house with him, miserable and mad as hell at John and Darlene for grounding him. We made the best of it and we all survived.
Steve had a circle of friends his own age, and
some
of them were boys. By the age of fifteen, like most boys, he had shown an interest in girls. I could tell that Steve loved his sisters very much and he would stand up for them without fear or favor. But they were, after all,
sisters;
in his eyes, they weren’t real girls. Steve already had an eye for the girls.
He was involved in soccer and was more than good at it. Once I tried to act the big brother and demonstrate my superior agility. But I quickly learned that he could run, kick, and dodge way better than I could—he could run circles around me, in fact. Occasionally, I would go to a match with John to watch Steve play. John was very proud of his son’s ability and his sportsmanship. I, on the other hand, couldn’t fall over a soccer ball if I tried. It didn’t bother me that Steve was athletic, until it struck me that there were so many things that Steve was that I wasn’t.
By the time I had been there less than a year, he had so many friends, and in particular so many girlfriends, that I felt like a fifth wheel. Through no fault of his, I started to become jealous of his popularity. I was feeling out of place, and I knew the age difference was significant. It’s one thing when
you’re
the teenager and your brother is just a kid. It’s okay to be a teenage dork, even. But when you are twenty-two and your younger brother is the popular teen, it’s hard being the dork.
Steve tried to make me feel comfortable, but it became apparent that he wanted his own space. I just couldn’t get over the fact that he was where I’d wanted to be years earlier. I started to question my place in life once again. But I had to face the fact that my chances to be a kid were long gone. I had to grow up. I knew in my heart that the teenager within me, even if that teenager had never thrived, was grown up now, and I had to allow myself to be an adult.
John and Darlene were supportive of my quest to grow up and act like an adult. They helped me understand that the more I acted like an adult, the more I would be treated like one. I learned, among other things, to balance my checkbook—and hated everything about that particular lesson. It took me a long time to understand that just because I had checks left in my checkbook, it didn’t mean I had the money to cover them. Paying bills was a chore and seemed like a waste of money for me. I could easily have found much better use for and more fun things to do with the little money I was earning at the restaurant.
At least I found that as I separated myself from Steve and spent more time with guys my own age, Steve still enjoyed my company. He was still the little brother I knew. I came to realize that the time I spent worrying about being a loner was a waste. I did have friends my own age,
and
I was still close to my new younger brother, Steve. I had been drug-free for over a year and was enjoying true friendships with guys who were not there to support my egocentric paranoia, and who liked me not for my ability to smoke myself into the Stone Age, but for other reasons. Finally, and most important, I had a family.
And I even looked better; my skin was clear and I didn’t look like death warmed over. I could actually breathe; I smelled good, I looked good—and I almost felt good about myself.
One of the few people who have ever touched my soul was Heather Nichols. She had the ability to talk to me in the innocence of youth, and yet she had desires and emotions equal to my own. In many ways we were a lot alike, looking for ourselves among the crowd of kids that surrounded us. We both wore our feelings on our sleeves, but found it incredibly hard to communicate exactly what we really felt—except to each other. Inside we had issues in our own minds and in our own hearts, and we understood the difference.
It was as if emotionally we were the same, the only difference between us being that I was almost twenty-three and she was coming up for ten.
Of all the kids and all the different personalities that made up the Nichols home, Heather was the one that I wanted to understand the most. I thrived on her ability to express herself. As with most nine-year-olds, she often didn’t know what it was she wanted or needed, but she was able to talk to me in such a real and honest way. I wished I had been like her at that age.
I guess throughout my short years with the Nichols family, I always thought of myself at different stages when I looked at Heather. I could relate to what she felt inside, even though the confusion and unsorted feelings were caused by such different events in our lives. Of course, she was oblivious to how I knew of the importance of sharing your feelings. She just did it because it was part of her style. It had taken me years and years to get to that point, and she was already there at the age of not quite ten.
About the same time I was having those issues with Steve and becoming aware that I had to grow up and be my own person, Heather taught me something that made the transition from teenager to adulthood meaningful. As we talked about everything from having a “dumb younger brother and mean older sisters” to the feeling we sometimes shared that “no one loves or understands me,” I realized that she had no idea of just how innocent her world was. She never knew anything of this at the time. She had no fears of sleeping at night, no fears of being hurt or belittled beyond ridicule. She certainly couldn’t comprehend one symptom of the fear and pain I carried around: oftentimes I would catch myself crying as we talked. It just touched me so much that a child could be that innocent and think the world was falling down around her when in reality she was free as a bird.
The biggest concern she had was the normal rivalry of siblings. I reminded her that her brother and sister, Steve and Wendy, loved her and didn’t
mean
to be older—they just were. Being the middle child, she had her share of being stepped on and over, but she never knew just how good she had it.
Heather had no problem speaking her mind or sharing her feelings with me. Often we would sit together on the back porch. She was able to talk to me as an older brother and as an adult as well. I had to hold back my true feeling that her concerns about being “lost in the crowd,” real as they were, were actually a blessing, and something I had always coveted.
So many times I wanted to just reach out and hug her, and cry with her. I wanted to just let it all out as she did so many times. I so desperately wanted to cry as a child would, as Heather did. In many ways I envied her the luxury of being able to talk. I recalled so many times when I was her age, having such a fear of adults that I stuttered constantly. I couldn’t string two words together, and yet here she was talking to me and sharing her feelings and letting me help her sort them out. In so many ways I wanted to be Heather, to relive my early years all over again. If she’d had her way we would have traded places. Or rather, truth be known, if I’d had
my
way, we would have.
Each time I sat and talked with her, I got a little closer to understanding myself. The feelings I’d had as a kid were so opposite to what Heather was going through that it made the difference as clear as day. Whereas I learned from Steve and Wendy the importance of being oneself, I grew to understand childhood through the eyes and heart of Heather Nichols.
I learned from Heather the importance of being a child.
The person that was the easiest to appreciate and get to know was Wendy. I had known her as a small child, but now that she was sixteen, she was very much her own person. She had a good sense of what was right and what was wrong. Her desire to embrace music and to achieve above average marks in school made her the brainiac of the family group. She had a sense of pride that I could only dream of.
Heidi, at the age of thirteen, was also easy to talk to. She was just getting out of the awkward preteen years and into the
really
awkward teenage ones. She had the ability to charm when she wanted to, and to stand up for herself when the occasion demanded.
The two girls were opposites. They needed each other, and yet were rivals. Their relationship reminded me of the one I always wanted Scott and me to have. We had our own issues with each other, and Wendy and Heidi Nichols did too. But Wendy and Heidi cared for each other, like sisters do. Heidi would never admit it out loud, but they needed each other both as sisters and as friends.
Wendy was able to make achieving one success after another look easy—it came natural to her. Her confidence and her desire to learn more and more were fueled by the support of her parents and a belief in herself. She went in for more activities than I can remember, and appeared to enjoy making order out of chaos. Heidi thrived on chaos, too.
Heidi was also an actress waiting to blossom. I would marvel at her ability to turn on the charm, and at her refusal to give in, no matter what the issue.
I had never really, deeply, loved anyone before. There were people that I enjoyed being around—and yes, people that I loved. But not like the twins, Adam and Amy. They taught me the meaning of brother-and-sisterly love.
They were the same age I was when my life was just starting to be a living nightmare. But Adam and Amy were so far from what I was when I was six years old. I loved being around them. I loved their freedom and their love of life. Often, when I thought of Adam, I thought of myself at that age. I so wished I’d had his love for life. But I couldn’t allow anyone to know that Adam was so special to me. Without knowing my background, it would have been just too odd to understand. I saw in Adam everything I’d wanted to be. I saw in him the little boy I never could be.
When I arrived at the Nichols home, Adam and Amy were five years old. They soon became the high point of any day for me. They were loving and carefree and I envied their innocence and the internal beauty they showed me.
They were also my safety valve. Whenever I felt sorry for myself, or felt like I was not moving along at the pace I should be, I would spend as much time with them as I could. They were able to remind me of what life should have been like for me at that age. I was so excited to watch them learn to express themselves and be comfortable as the children they were. They had no fear of anything. They were real and they were tender.
Adam and Amy were the reason I finally became comfortable with the notion of being a father. I thought a lot about eventually having kids, and wanted so desperately for my own kids to love me like they did. I was convinced that someday, when I got myself together, I would be a father and my kids would be just as beautiful as Adam and Amy, both on the inside and on the outside.
Just as I did from the rest of the Nichols family, I learned a great deal from those two. I learned how to be patient and how to love life as they did. (One of my few disappointments to do with this period of my life would be to miss them growing up.)
Secretly I struggled with the overwhelming questions:
Could I ever be a parent?
What if what Mom did to us was out of my control and was a part of me that I had yet to discover?
Was I going to be an abusive parent?
Walking Adam and Amy down the street in a twin stroller, listening to them talking to each other though not really understanding too much of what they were saying, I began to see that fatherhood was perhaps a dream for me. Something I wanted, and yet something I was not sure I could ever achieve. I knew that anyone could be a father. The dream was to be looked up to like I looked up to John and to be respected and truly loved like I loved Darlene.