Chapter 1: Misery, the Show Me State

Fall, 1981

Daddy and I flew on the same plane as the silver box they put mommy in to get her back to Oneida in upstate New York. After the funeral, daddy, with a surprised look on his face, told me that were we not going back to Germany. The Army was sending him to Ft. Leonard Wood, in the middle of nowhere, Missouri. I would later find out daddy was surprised to be going there because it was an engineering base, not a major hub of intelligence.

For the next four years we lived in a little two-bedroom apartment provided by the Army. I began school the next year in the Fall of 1981 and was so bored I came home at the end of my first week and begged daddy to let me stay home. Instead he signed me up for soccer on the condition that I go to school and get good grades. I think it was just his way of keeping my mind off of mommy. I would still wake up in the middle of the night with bad dreams. When this would happen, and it happened more often than daddy or my doctor wanted, he would bundle me up in my favorite blanket and carry me into his room to finish the night. Soccer seemed to make the dreams come less often, but it would be five years before I could go a full month without sleeping in daddy's bed at least once.

I hated Missouri. Or Misery, as I began to call it after the first year. Ft. Leonard Wood is out in the middle of nowhere and the only descent-sized town is more than an hour away. Daddy would have to drive me all the way out to Springfield or St. Louis to go Christmas and birthday shopping.

The only thing I liked about Misery was there were plenty of woods to play in. The boys in my neighborhood liked to play guns in the woods. At first they wouldn't let me play with them because I was a girl. Dolls no longer held any entertainment for me. I never analyzed it; I just packed them in a box and went looking for something better to do. When I saw the boys sneaking around the apartment buildings, in between the cars, and in the woods, I though it looked like fun. But like I said, they wouldn't let me play because I was a girl. After I scared the bejesus out of most of them several times over the space of a weekend, they began fighting over which team I would be on. I had so much fun the first time they let me play with them that I begged daddy to buy me an army outfit so I could play guns better. I think this worried him. I overheard him talking on the phone with my aunts and my other grandma before he finally bought it for me. He stopped short of buying me a toy gun, though. I had to save up my allowance for almost three months to buy my own gun.

Daddy kept buying me dolls and stuffed toys and other girlie things for my birthday and Christmas. I put some of them on the shelves in my room and the rest I smuggled to school and sold to my girlfriends. He also kept buying me dresses and girlie clothes. I made a habit of wearing them to soccer practice. It only took him about a season and a half to surrender and start buying me boy's jeans. By the time second grade came, I only owned two dresses. One of them was a long black one with long sleeves and a high collar that I wore to Uncle Saul's funeral and Christmas Mass. The other dress was a light blue dress that stopped at my knees. It was frilly, lacey, and I hated it. I only wore it to Easter Mass once before I hit my growth spurt. Thank God for hormones! When Easter came around in 1982, the damned thing was too tight and I got to throw it away.

I really think daddy began to realize that with mommy gone and no women around to interact with me, he was slowly watching me become a tomboy. It bothered him so much that he started dating. He was trying to find me a new mommy. When this first dawned on me in the winter of 1982 I almost assaulted him in his sleep. I stood over him with one of his softball bats, thinking really hard. In the end, I began remembering what it was like when mommy died and I went back to bed.

I did throw a tantrum the next day after lunch, screaming and crying and generally calling him all the words I had learned from the boys that I knew I wasn't supposed to know yet. It was a good fit and took nearly an hour for daddy to get me calmed down enough to talk to me. He was thinking all the things I thought he was. He regretted losing his little girl. He liked me when I dressed up in dresses and pastels. He liked my hair done up in the elaborate styles that mommy used to do. He found it cute when I used to play with my dolls or my tea set or my play kitchen set. In short, he missed his little girl and he thought it was his fault she was gone. He was trying to get her back.

I wiggled down from the chair he had thumped me down in and climbed up into his lap. Really looking at him, I was shocked to suddenly realize how much older he was looking. I guess we both had been drifting along on autopilot since mommy died. His black hair was no longer cut really short and brushed nice. His face was covered in scratchy hair and there were lines on his face that didn't used to be there. He looked tired. His blue eyes were dull and weary. He used to look like a more muscular version of Pierce Brosnan and now he looked like Grandpa McKiernan did before he died.

"I don't want another mommy, daddy," I told him seriously, taking his head in my little hands. "I don't want to play dolls or anything like that anymore. I like playing guns and soccer and stuff. You can't do that stuff in dresses. Besides, all the boys try to look up the girl's dresses."

Daddy smiled and sighed. Some of the energy that was missing from his eyes came back and he gave me a big hug. "You watch yourself around the boys, Alexandra. Little boys can be mean to little girls. If anybody does anything you don't like, you tell me. All right?"

I giggled and turned red. "Uh ... everybody knows not to do anything I don't like to me or my friends in school," I mumbled with reluctance and a little bit of embarrassment.

Worried, daddy lifted my chin with a big finger. "What do you mean?"

"I ... uh ... I was in a few fights."

Blue eyes widened. "How many?" he demanded.

I shrugged. "When?"