The Wall of Secrets

Chapter 1: On the Outside Looking In

1977

The last time I saw my mother, she told me I was dead. “Dead to us,” was how she put it, leaning over my hospital bed, my wrists bandaged and bloody and my head hurting so bad it felt like someone had hammered nails into my brain. That was from all the pills.

“I’m so embarrassed,” my mother wailed, followed by a barrage of insults before telling me I could never come home.

Why would I ever want to go home? I wondered. I hadn’t been home in years, not since I ran away when I was fifteen and ended up living on the streets of Toronto. Those were the wild years, the years of playing guitar, smoking pot, and running with Satan’s Choice. They were a pretty rough motorcycle gang, but they were good to me. That’s when I got addicted to heroin and things really got weird. After I got out of prison, I started turning my life around. I couldn’t have done it without my friend, Daryl. She was an amazing woman, and an amazing musician. We made such wonderful music together.

But then she got sick and died.

Shit happens.

I just couldn’t handle anymore shit in my life, so when she got really sick I got the pills. I don’t remember swallowing the whole bottle, and I sure don’t remember cutting my wrists.

But I sure do remember waking up in the hospital to find my mother leaning over me, her red lipstick smeared across her mouth as thick as frosting making her lips look like a gashing, blood-drenched wound, like the severed flesh of my arms.

“As far as we’re concerned, you’re dead to us,” she hissed, then turned around, grabbed my dad by the arm and walked out.

I first began to understand the terrible secret of my birth when I was eight years old. I didn’t clearly understand it, but the truth started tickling my brain, like truth does sometimes.

I had this cousin, Sherry. Sherry was a mean girl, and she always let my cousins know they were adopted. They were two girls on my mom’s side, and they’d been adopted and my cousin Sherry liked to point that out.

“You’re not even real family!” She’d taunt them, “Your parents gave you away!”

I always bit my tongue when she said that. I didn’t quite understand it completely, but I knew that they were real family and that my cousin was just being mean.

Then she started saying it to me.

That’s when I knew just how mean she was, and that her words were just lies. She just said that about any cousin she didn’t like, I decided. My other cousins, the adopted ones, said she was right, that I was adopted, too, just like they were. But I knew they were only saying that so they wouldn’t feel so alone. Obviously, I wasn’t adopted. I had baby pictures to prove it.

But that’s when it started to tickle my brain.

What if I was?

So I asked my mom, a few times, but she just ignored the question or simply changed the subject.

She probably thought it was a ridiculous question.

Which it was.