The pretty flight attendant in an orange mini dress and white belt walked Aren and me through the boarding gate doorway and down the accordion passageway to the plane’s door. Three seats sat on one side of the plane, with two on the other. The flight attendant sat us up front in a two-seat section and got us buckled in for the flight. Aren started to point out all the things he saw out of the plane’s window.
“Look, Anna, there’s a guy with our suitcases. Look, Anna, there’s a guy with orange cones,” he said, pointing out the tiny oval window for me to see it all. Following his finger out the window and acting interested, I invited him to continue. “Wow, what else do you see out there, Aren?”
While Aren narrated the tarmac, I drifted—back to another arrival, another crossing, to a place that promised more than it gave. I continued my dreamy trip from Florida to today. The Warehouse period came in too clearly.
After I had stayed with them for several months following the Alabama car accident, Grandma Helen and Grandpa Dick delivered me from La Jolla, CA to Mommy in San Francisco to start my life with her. Aren lived with Dad in Florida and skipped the Warehouse experience. I felt excited to begin building a new life with Mommy - one I thought Aren and I would experience happily together when he arrived.
Mommy walked me up to the Warehouse for the first time. Its school bus yellow paint made it look promising. I had ridden school buses for trips with my preschool in Florida, and that color reminded me of fun times. Maybe the Warehouse had tons of fun kids to play with inside? Maybe there was a school inside with a play kitchen and toys? I hoped for the best and squeezed Mommy’s hand in anticipation.
Once inside the oversized metal door, nothing looked like a home or classroom.
Barren space and dusty floors covered with wood and other scraps from old work done there greeted us. A pathway to the elevator guided Mommy and me through the unfriendly stark environment. Mommy led us quickly past the first-floor beams to a giant box she told me was the elevator. With a rope hanging from above, she pulled a door of metal fencing down in front of the opening and then another across the inside. This was nothing like the elevator I rode at the hospital in Alabama. Mommy flipped a switch on the wall; the box bounced and began lifting us upward.
When we reached our floor, I felt the San Francisco cold and—in this new drafty space—I recognized familiar smells of incense, marijuana, and cigarette smoke intertwined. Mommy walked us across the center of the dark space to our spot near the light of the windows. We entered our new home by pulling back a sheet that served as a door. Disappointment set in when I saw Bobby, and then more disappointment when I smelled his scary dog. Two rooms created by hanging sheets, with a window serving as the only ventilation for the abundance of smoke and the stench of Bobby’s dog, made up our section of the Warehouse’s second floor.
My mattress on the floor lay on one side of the dividing sheet-wall, where most of our moving boxes sat unopened. Bobby, Mommy, and the dog slept on the other side, on a mattress on the floor under the window. This place did not live up to my memories of SW 23rd Drive. It was nothing like Grandma Helen and Grandpa Dick’s apartment, where I had just spent several weeks waiting for Mommy to send for me.
After the crash, while Mommy recuperated in the Alabama hospital, Grandma Helen and Grandpa Dick swept me up and—for those few months—I lived the high life in the idyllic town of La Jolla, California in their 2-bedroom apartment on Prospect Street. Grandma and I walked uphill to the library twice a week. She read to me every night before bed and I even attended ballet lessons. I felt safe and cared for at Grandma Helen and Grandpa Dick’s La Jolla apartment. A view of the Pacific Ocean from the kitchen window and being just blocks from the beach and Children’s Cove made it joyous. I sat at the breakfast room table eating my Froot Loops and looked out, seeing the spray of whales swimming in the distance.
Grandma made cookies every week and kept them in a clay pot Mommy had thrown on her kick wheel years before. It had a lid with a swishy handle and made a lot of noise when I opened it—no sneaking cookies at Grandma’s. While in La Jolla, I lived like the little girls on television: attended to, surrounded by toys and books, well fed, loved, happy and learning something new every day. A dream life compared to my couple of weeks with the trailer family, and the soon-to-be life in our Warehouse in San Francisco.
In the Warehouse, with only sheets as walls, we could hear all the other Warehouse families’ business, and I could hear everything Mommy and Bobby said and did through the night. The damp San Francisco wind blew through our tiny space and moved the sheet walls in cold, lonely gusts. I shivered and slept fully dressed most of the time. I made myself think of better places and often dreamed about sleeping comfortably at Grandma and Grandpa’s.
There, Grandma slept in the small bedroom toward the back of their apartment, Grandpa slept in the large one with a view of the ocean. When I stayed with them, I shared Grandma’s room. Of the two bouncy twin beds up on frames, I got the one by the window. Grandma always slept with her knees up with a pillow underneath them. She snored loudly, but I loved being in her room with her anyway, and I would fall right back to sleep, even if her snoring woke me up.
Sometimes the barking of Bobby’s dog woke me up at the Warehouse. The size and odor of the dog in our tiny home space increased my feelings of “I don’t belong here.” In our already cramped quarters, Bobby’s big dog took up most of the floor space, and its smell filled our section.
In Florida, we had cats. Heathcliff, our biggest, stretched to the same length and size as me at six months old. Cats are soft, curl up with you, and make cute sounds. Bobby’s dog didn’t feel like a pet to me. It felt like an intruder and made me keep more to myself. I thought Mommy was a cat person, but now we never even talked about what happened to Heathcliff or the other cats when we left Florida. They just weren’t with us anymore—like so many other things I missed in our new life together.
Unlike in Florida, I have no bath time memories from the Warehouse—only waking up and needing to pee. Filthy floors and walls filled the dark space we used as a bathroom. I always peed in the dark because the light string for the pull chain hung too high for me to reach. When I had to go, I left our sheet-walled space and headed to the main area of our floor, looked both ways down the hallway to see if anyone was coming, then ducked into the dark bathroom alone. I locked the door behind me and touched my way to the toilet’s edge.
In Florida, bath time included toys, songs, and bubbles. Mommy stayed with me the whole time, and we talked and sang as the bubbles changed from puffy to barely there on the water’s surface. That’s how you knew it was time to get out—when the bubbles disappeared. Grandma Helen’s fancy bathroom had sliding glass doors around the bathtub and fluffy towels. She didn’t sit and play with me the whole time, but she let me take plastic tubs into the bath and play until the water got cool. In Florida and at Grandma Helen’s, bathrooms were always lit and the tile floors were always clean.
Aren stopped describing the world outside the airplane and flew a paper airplane he’d folded from something he found in the seat pocket in front of him. “Shzzzz!” “Ssssrrrrrr!” “Zoooooommmm!”
Even though Aren sat right next to me, I felt alone. The Warehouse memories stirred my loneliness, and I thought more about what made me feel so isolated in that communal space with Mommy.